My Grandmother Is a Crape Myrtle — Alex Hembree-Padgett
i.
My grandmother lived in Apartment 505 of her nursing home, Kirkwood by the River. And by June 30th of 2025 it was fully emptied. It only took seven days to clear the apartment out despite how much my grandmother hoarded—piles of books in Latin and French, collectibles of postcards and coins from decades past. This was certainly not because she had the kindness to do a sweep of all her meaningless collections before she died. It was due to my mother’s pure resolve. I was and am still lazy, and I only worked for two days. By the time I started, everything in four out of six rooms and two out of three closets was already disposed of, in one way or another.
Not once in my life did I see my grandmother without her teddy bears. She had many different kinds. Some were meticulously crafted by Louis Vuitton and Steiff and some were mass-produced from the local Walgreens. When I arrived at her apartment after she passed, the teddy bears that were usually lining the two bookshelves in the room, with the tattered La-Z-Boy that she spent most of her years in, had vanished, along with the stuffed animals in display cases and on her bed and in her drawers. My mother had gotten rid of them. Disappointment colored me. Hadn’t she told me that we would make a bonfire next to our garden out back and drop the teddy bears, one by one, into the furious sparks? My mother had already lied to me about how my grandmother had died and now she had lied about this. What was next?
Most of the two short days that I participated in the cleaning of the apartment were spent swaddling dishes in paper and placing them in cardboard boxes. Porcelain plates and teacups that had designs of delicate peonies and lilies. I went through letters from a man named “Timmy G.” that were stacked atop the floor. All of the pages signed with this name were equally disturbing. A few included two misshapen dogs making love. Others had sloppily drawn smiling stick figure versions of my grandmother, with her iconic permed mane, and “Timmy G.” holding hands. On the last night of going through my grandmother’s apartment, I saw a pencil with a teddy bear head glued where the eraser was usually found. The rage that I felt could not be diminished. I tore it off the wooden stick, the flimsy material easily giving way. I grabbed scissors from an untaped package and proceeded to chop off its ears. I stabbed one of the scissors’ two blades around the fabric of the black, marble eye until it dropped out, rolling across the kitchen tiles. I slit its mouth. I picked up a used battery and a discarded paper clip and lodged them both in the empty eye socket. And then I left the tortured bear in the freezer for the staff to find. A last goodbye from me and my grandmother.
My mother, meanwhile, hauled loads of worthless junk and precious memories into Salvation Army trucks. I would talk with her about what we would do when we left the nursing home. I spoke of the beach trip that was only two weeks away and the kayak we would rent. I told her about the little girl at the park who had picked a satsuma from a branch only a few feet away and presented it to me with open hands, as if the fruit was an exquisite jewel. I did most of the talking.
ii.
On November 4th of 2024, the day before the election results came in, my mother decided it would be a good idea to plant a crape myrtle tree because “spring and fall are the best times to plant them, and it is fall.” And because we needed something to keep us company for the next century. And because if Donald Trump won, the crape myrtle would still be there.
My mother and I were angry for many reasons. The politics of our country, the freedom that had begun to drain from our pores, and, as always, the state of my grandmother. So, we stabbed the shovels that we borrowed from our neighbor, who always seemed to be hovering behind us, through the ground and stripped back layers of earth, like we were skinning rabbits.
iii.
I have despised, and always will, my grandmother’s nursing home. I despised the couches in the living area, the rich-veneered, cheaply made couches. The couches that were faded colors of green and orange, and felt like grains of dried rice when you ran your fingers down them. I despised the old man who perched on those couches whistling at my mother and me. Licking his lips and then blowing air through them. I despised being her granddaughter at that dejected and unfortunate place. I despised that everything looked the same, every time I went to the nursing home. I despised her apartment: the stench of feces that clung to her curtains, her recliner, her cat, her body. Once my grandmother reeked so wretchedly that my mother smothered her nose in Vick’s Vap-O-Rub to block the smell of her. I despised her TV that never turned on. The glass snowman that was placed next to her at Christmas because it was always Christmas. And the teddy bears.
My grandmother should’ve been in Skilled Nursing, where they contained people who were severely unstable. Some days she would call up my mother, bedbound and dying. On another day she would go to the hair salon down on floor three and then to the dining room with her friends. Depression hit. Mania hit harder. But, not even the manager of the home could force my grandmother to move to Skilled Nursing. Because her cat could not come with her and neither could her teddy bears, she would not go. She refused to leave her soft, vulnerable kitty and the rest of her inanimate children.
My grandmother was in hospice for three years, longer than Jimmy Carter, if you’re counting.
iv.
It has been a known fact to me, even as a child, that old people latch on to young people. Young ranging from an infant to fifty, at least when it concerns nursing homes. As a granddaughter there, I was swarmed most often, a slab of meat to starved men. I loathed this attention. To be transparent, I don’t enjoy the company of any old people in the slightest. Wrinkled bodies came at me, petting my youthful complexion. They tugged at my vibrant dresses, combed out my short, light brown locks, and fawned over my red sandals. They nicknamed me dear or honey, which became terms I resented. They were tearing me apart, my skin unwinding into pink ribbons that gracefully dropped to the floor.
v.
Halfway through the digging process, the sky turned a deep lavender and wept, much like we did. My mother and I did not stop. We pounced onto the shoulders of the shovels with the heels of our feet and lodged them into the dirt, slowly turning into mud that slipped underneath us. Sludge and water speckled our white flesh, like little freckles across our cheeks. Our pained, synchronized grunts and moans turned into hymns and filled the front yard. The neighbor gazed at us in appreciation, leaning against the side of her newly painted house. Us, disrupting our usually quiet roads, something the neighbor would do. The presumed scoffing of the family across the street with the billowing, upside down American flag that we could not hear over the rain that pounded on our skulls. The occasional rustle of the silver outdoor cat we fed, watching our wrath reach its peak.
vi.
After my grandmother died, my mother told me that years ago, her mother choked on a lamb kebab in the dining hall of her nursing home. In front of every elder in the building, as she did, always very dramatic, my grandmother. She called my mother to say, “I have choked but I am fine. When will you come see me again, daughter?” In a tone that also said, “If you do not come see me again, you will no longer be my daughter.”
A long pause and then my mother breathed, “Soon.”
I believe in that moment my mother was relieved that she would never have to choke on a lamb kebab in order to gain my attention. Because my mother was a vegetarian. Because my mother was not her mother.
vii.
My mother had told me that my grandmother collapsed in the middle of dinner, but this was a lie. My grandmother choked on a piece of meat in the dining hall. In front of every elder in the building. She was dead for twenty-five minutes before she was revived. Paramedics continued giving her Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation even as they were provided a Do Not Resuscitate order and my grandmother was supposedly long gone. I believe that I may have been there because I sometimes remember what she looked like. Eyes bulging. Face red. Purple. Blue. Gray again. Foam spilling from her mouth like clusters of small, fluffy white flowers.
viii.
In the evening, my mother and I placed the tree in the ground and covered its roots with well-drained soil. We strung it down with pliable ropes, keeping it safe from the swishing autumn wind. Our bright yellow and green rubber boots sunk into the grass, yearning to be buried like our crape myrtle was. That night, my mother named the crape myrtle, “The Suffragette Tree.” November 5th, the day Donald Trump won the election, it became, “The Suffragette Suffering Tree.” My mother laughed, knowing that we would lose ourselves all over again. And I laughed with her.
ix.
The most vivid and gnarly memories I have revolve around my grandmother eating food. When I was little enough to stand just below her crippled form that embraced a walker, I found how she ate to be fascinating. Jaw locked open. Tongue lolling out. Grease spilling down chin.
A year and a half before she choked for the last time, December 2024, we were sitting at her crowded table with absurd bobbles all around us. A Yorkie purse made in the Philippines with a red bow seared onto its wooden fur, gaudy pearls that my grandmother had clutched in her girlish period of life, frowning figurines of babies with the faces of grown men. The tabby cat pawing at my grandmother’s chair begged for Royal Crispy Chicken, that she, even in her weakened state, still slid to him. I gave her a browned, onion ring and she caressed it with her thick saliva. It stuck to her stubble. And we continued sitting, her Burger King laid out on teddy bear plates with teddy bear rags that sat on my lap.
x.
It takes three to five years for a crape myrtle to sprout buds, but ours bloomed only six months after it was planted. The week after my grandmother died. Long, peeling branches reaching out to our big, plopping tears. Small, fluffy white flowers laced with green pods, looping around them.
Statement:
On June 21st, my grandmother passed away from choking on a piece of meat at her nursing home. I had very mixed feelings about this. Although I loathed her, she was still my grandmother and I went through a depressive period because of her death. I attempted to separate my mental health dip from her death, but eventually it clicked together, I cared for my grandmother.
It deeply impacted me and my mother's relationship, she was very distant and almost resentful towards me and I had no way to stop her from drifting away. My mother has always been my number one editor and it hurt when she said that she would not read it, but I know I was slowly draining her too.
When creating this work in September, truthfully, all I felt was numbness. My grandmother was truly an awful person. She manipulated, tormented, and abused my mother for fifty-two years and I think by writing this down on paper, I captured some of her deceit. This piece was the best way that I could cope with my family's loss. Everyday I see more of her in myself and it is horrifying.
Putting this essay out into the world, I can’t stop people from interpreting me as a monster for writing this about my own grandmother and criticizing her entire life. But this is who my grandmother was, and how I felt about her and there is no way for me to change that. This grief that I endured was much different from when my cat or my Nana passed. I will never experience emotions that conflict so much after a death again. This was especially reserved for my grandmother, which she would probably enjoy.
Alex Hembree-Padgett is a New Orleans bred poet and fiction writer. They especially enjoy the dark, weird, and obscure. They are in an arts conservatory, focusing on creative writing and have been published in Umbra and were a finalist for the Patty Friedmann Contest. When Alex isn't dwelling on the nature of the universe they are spending time with their devilish, black, tripod cat, Circe.