“Dear Marjorie”

Sometime around mid-April 2020 I called my Grandma in Sarasota from my apartment in Chicago, and after some back and forth about how crazy the world was getting, I asked her something I never thought would come out of my mouth, “How’d you like a roommate?”

Some back story. I had been living in my first Big Boy Solo Apartment™ for about 8 months, and really enjoying the independence of being able to be whoever I wanted all of the time without thought of judgment or concern from others. In March, when the shutdown hit, that enjoyment shifted to general terror as I lived in a 5 story elevator building with 100 other people in it. For somebody with a mostly in remission OCD brain, it became difficult to leave my apartment without fear of breathing in the same elevator or stairwell as those people. My spacious 1 bedroom apartment close to Lake Michigan became more of a little square prison stacked above and below other square prisons. Which I’m sure somebody who has experienced actual prison would agree with.

I got a little respite when my childhood cat was transferred from his free range suburban house with my parents into my cell, but after a month of that I had hit my breaking point. I immediately thought of going to my Grandma’s house in William’s Bay, Wisconsin. A little A-frame cottage that had been a core part of summers growing up, and more recently my winter writing retreat when I had breaks in between gigs, and while my Grandma was in Florida for the winter. I thought that would be a place I could go and breathe without wrapping a proprietary blend of paper towels, t-shirts, and scarves around my whole head when leaving the house, in the days before masks or understanding any element of what we were all going to be dealing with. 

So I called my Grandma. I had been trying to do that more the last few years anyway, as she was approaching 90, but also because of a discovery I made during one of my writing retreats at the cottage. I was on the floor stretching on a foam roller one afternoon when I noticed a row of books on a small shelf underneath the disconnected but still physically present landline in the main room. Books I knew were there, but somehow had never taken the time to really look at. Books with titles like, “How To Grieve The Loss of a Husband.” I immediately started bawling. My Grandpa had died in 2003, 15 years before that. I was 13 at the time and that was the first death I experienced in my life. It messed me up and rearranged my brain in a number of ways, but at that age I had never had the wherewithal to understand how hard that must have been for my Grandma. And how hard it must still be as someone from a generation whose identity was always more “Marge and Dave,” than just Marge.