Hilde on the record, p.7
Hilde on the Record, page 7
When I made it back to my house two hours later, my parents were in the living room. Georgie, now incredibly graceful at three, was performing one of her choreographed dances as baby Juju lay on a blanket nearby. My parents looked like they were in the middle of another intense conversation but rearranged their faces into joy when they saw me. I spent the next ten minutes filling them in on my adventure. When I got to the part about the critical neighbors, my mom got really angry.
“Which neighbors?” she wanted to know right away.
My mom is one of the kindest people you could ever meet. She is very friendly and always concerned about making other people feel comfortable. Just don’t mess with her kids. People are often shocked by the side of her personality that comes out when defending her children. It takes a lot to push her there, but when it happens—look out. She doesn’t yell (which is probably even scarier than yelling). Instead, she gets like one of those TV lawyers who tears the witness to shreds.
Since we were still new to the neighborhood, I started to regret telling my mom anything about the neighbors who gave me a hard time. The last thing I wanted was her going to their houses to “have a little talk” with them. If I was going to be taken seriously as a reporter, I had to learn to fight my own battles, and this one didn’t seem worth bothering with.
Luckily, it was possible to persuade my mom not to confront the neighbors. After all, people were allowed to have their own opinions about our family, even if we didn’t agree with them. My parents were also distracted by several things. With Christmas right around the corner, there were constantly things to be done. My dad, still trying to make up for having missed so much of Christmas that last year in Brooklyn, went all out. Instead of going to a tree stand for our Christmas tree, we now went out into the woods and cut down our own. Every night, he would put me and Georgie into a wagon (Izzy was already “too cool” for this) and pull us around the neighborhood to look at all the pretty lights. There were Christmas movies to watch, cookies to bake, and trips to see Santa. Meanwhile, my mom decorated our house and spent what seemed like weeks cooking all the special foods we would eat on Christmas Eve.
There were also more trips to my Grammie and Grandpa’s house. It seemed like we were going a few days a week now. Instead of eating a big meal each time we went, the grown-ups would send us into another room to play while they sat in the living room talking in hushed voices. My Grandpa spent much of this time in his recliner in his study, just listening to classical music. He wasn’t doing any better. In fact, he seemed worse each time we visited.
I kept from worrying about my Grandpa so much by working on the next issue of the Orange Street News. But just like Grammie used to say, it’s never the things you’re worrying about. I had no way of knowing how right she was.
19
The Last
Do you ever wish you knew when something was the last? The last time you would want to play with your favorite childhood toy, the last time your older sibling would think you were cool, the last time you would have to ride in the booster seat in the back of your parents’ car. . . . Almost every day something happens that will never happen again, without our knowing. Usually, these things aren’t a huge deal, but when you look back, you might wish you had appreciated that time a little more.
The last Christmas with my Grammie and Grandpa was different. Even though no one really knew it would be the last, it had a feeling of special importance that everyone appreciated. The day was magical. The warm glow of the Christmas tree seemed to also live somewhere inside me. We had already opened our presents at our house that morning, but my sisters and I had the excitement of Grammie and Grandpa’s gift ahead of us. We sat in the living room—my family, both my uncles and their wives, my three cousins, and Grammie and Grandpa. Even though Grandpa was very thin and weak, it seemed like everyone’s worries were on hold, as even he was able to sit in his chair next to the tree while we all opened our gifts. I almost fell out of my seat when I unwrapped the deluxe Barbie mall I had given up hope on getting.
My Grammie had the most beautiful drinking glasses that had been passed down to her from her relatives in Italy. Some were blue and some were red, and they were hand-painted with little flowers and dipped in real gold. She only used them on Christmas. While everyone admired them, I think I loved them the most. Because they were so delicate, the young children did not get to use them. This Christmas, though, after we opened gifts, Grammie called me into the kitchen. I watched as she poured sparkling grape juice into one of the beautiful blue cups and handed it to me as we all made our way to the dining table.
Just when I thought there was no more room in my stomach, Grammie would bring out another big plate of food. It was hard work trying to save space for the many desserts that would follow, but I somehow managed. Everyone was in a festive mood, laughing and joking and telling stories about when my dad and his brothers were young. When we left to go see my Mimi and Pop-Pop later in the day, I felt so grateful for having such a big, wonderful family.
The week after Christmas is the one time my parents let the house stay messy with our toys. Usually, they are on us about keeping things tidy and put away where they belong. But, for this one week, all our new toys we got as presents can be scattered all over the living room. I spent that week playing and putting the finishing touches on the next issue of the Orange Street News.
Still thinking about how dangerous some of my neighbors seemed to think our town was, I decided to interview a Selinsgrove police officer to get the real story. (Spoiler alert: it was really safe!) I also decided to begin including a short fiction story that I wrote in each issue. I had so much fun making up a tale of haunted dolls in an attic. My “Message from Hilde” was about New Year’s resolutions. Mine were morning bike rides on the weekends, creating new holidays, and watching my baby sister, Juliet, grow and play (maybe I wasn’t such a jerk after all!). When it was time to return to school on Monday, January 5, I felt like I’d had the best Christmas break of my life.
When I got home from school, my mom had just gotten back from coffee with my Grammie. Again, my parents greeted me with enthusiasm, but I could tell something was off. I had my snack and decided to go up to my bedroom.
On my way up the stairs, I overheard my parents talking. “I mean, she’s under so much stress, Matt. They need to get some answers. Clearly, something is wrong with him,” my mom said.
“You know my mom is always stressing about something. She’ll be all right. Once they get the results of the scan tomorrow, we can figure out what to do. I think she’ll feel better when they have a plan,” my dad responded.
“I hope so. She was just so upset today, Matt. I mean she really didn’t seem good at all.”
The next day when I left for school, I knew that my Grammie would be taking my Grandpa to have a PET scan. This is a type of test where they inject dye into a person and then basically take pictures of the tissues and organs to see how they are functioning. My Grandpa was having this test to see if his cancer was back. Everyone was really nervous, hoping for the best while preparing for the worst.
When I came home from school that day, my mom was rushing around frantically, trying to get baby Juliet changed and into her car seat.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Grammie’s been in an accident, Hilds. Dad and Izzy are already there, but we need to hurry. She’s at the hospital. I don’t know any more than that. Dad’s trying to find out what’s going on now.”
20
The Saddest Tuesday
It was Tuesday, but my dad and Izzy had gone to Grammie and Grandpa’s earlier in the day to take down the Christmas tree. At some point, my uncle Andy called my dad to say Grammie had been in a car accident in the parking lot of the hospital. My dad left Izzy at the house and rushed to the hospital, only a mile away. As I rode in the car with my little sisters to Grammie and Grandpa’s house, I tried to comfort myself by thinking that an accident in a parking lot couldn’t be that bad.
But in the initial moments afterward, there was much confusion and the information we were getting turned out to be inaccurate. When we got to my grandparents’ house, my dad’s car was in the driveway. I let out a big sigh of relief. If Grammie was in really bad shape, my dad would have been at the hospital. As soon as we parked, I noticed my Mimi’s car was there too. I thought that was strange. Usually, my Mimi and Pop-Pop only came to Grammie and Grandpa’s house for big occasions like birthdays or holidays. I watched as my mom ran to my Mimi’s car. In what seemed like only seconds, Mom sprinted as fast as she could into the house. My Mimi came to us, still in the backseat of my mom’s car. She looked like she had been crying. The sinking feeling in my stomach returned.
“Where’s Grammie? Is she OK?” I asked, my voice sounding more frantic than I wanted it to.
“Let’s get your sisters out,” was all she said in response.
As Mimi set about unbuckling Juliet from her car seat, I reached over and set Georgie free from her booster. I felt sick and confused and worried—so, so worried. Even though it felt like hours passed, my mom came back out in what was just a few minutes. She gave Mimi a hug, thanked her, and began leading us inside.
My dad was standing inside the entry to my grandparents’ house. Something didn’t look right about him, but I couldn’t place what it was.
“Come with me, Hilds,” he said as he started walking up the stairs to the room we used to sleep in when we would visit from Brooklyn. My mom stayed downstairs with my little sisters. I didn’t know where Izzy was.
My dad began speaking, but I couldn’t make sense of the words he was saying. My mind had latched on to one sentence and kept replaying the words over and over in a broken loop: Grammie died.
What really happened (the short version): Grammie died of a broken heart.
What really happened (the longer story): My Grammie took my Grandpa to have his PET scan. Because Grandpa was so weak, she didn’t want him to have to walk to the parking lot afterward, so she went to pull the car around for him. The doctors told us that almost immediately after she started the car, her heart stopped. She must have had her foot on the gas pedal because as she went unconscious, her car smashed into the parking barrier.
There was a lot of discussion about why Grammie’s heart stopped. The doctors talked about her high blood pressure and the fact that she was overweight. “Was she under any stress?” they asked my dad. Of course we all knew that Grammie’s heart couldn’t handle the idea of losing Grandpa.
Two days later, the day before my Grammie’s funeral, we got the results of my Grandpa’s PET scan: the cancer was back and it had spread all throughout his body. All of Grammie’s worries came true. Just five short weeks after my Grammie passed away, my Grandpa died from his cancer.
Hilde’s Grammie and Grandpa, Gina and Arthur Lysiak.
21
The Aftermath
I started wetting the bed.
This is not something I have ever told anyone outside of my family. But I cannot describe what I felt like during those first few months after my grandparents’ deaths without including it. There was nothing medically wrong with me. Sometimes we forget that our bodies are very connected to our emotions. Bed-wetting was my reminder. In my case, the sadness and emptiness I felt over losing my grandparents caused my body to go a little crazy for a while. Doctors say this can happen after a child goes through a trauma. Losing my grandparents so suddenly and unexpectedly was traumatic to my whole family. We all just handled it differently.
My dad stopped eating. Because he is such a strong and upbeat person, he tried very hard not to show us how upset he was. He talked with me and my sisters about how we were feeling every day to make sure we were OK. But even though he was putting on a happy face, we saw that he was losing weight and knew how sad he really was too.
My mom was more expressive. She cried a lot in the days and weeks afterward. She didn’t try to hide it from us because she thinks it’s good to be sad when something bad happens.
Izzy didn’t talk about it much. Instead, she spent more and more time in her bedroom writing songs and playing guitar.
Juliet, of course, was only two months old, but Georgie, at three, was the most devastating to watch. Not only had she been very close with Grammie, but she was also too young to really understand what death was. This meant she would ask things like, “When Grammie comes back from the cemetery, will she look the same?” Then my mom would have to explain that Grammie wouldn’t be coming back, and Georgie would cry and cry. Watching that made me feel even worse.
I didn’t talk to anyone about how I was feeling. Looking back, I think that is why I started wetting the bed. Those sad feelings had to find a way out of my body somehow. At the time, of course, I didn’t really understand that. All I knew was that I was an eight-year-old who had to start wearing Pull-Ups at night. So embarrassing! I remember getting invited to a sleepover birthday party for one of the girls from my class. I wanted to go but was too afraid that someone would find out. I remember talking with my mom about it and her hiding the Pull-Up inside a special section of my overnight bag where no one would see.
Even though I felt horrible, I had to fulfill the promise I had made to my Grammie to keep putting out the Orange Street News. She may have been gone, but she had bought all those subscriptions for our family and her friends. She didn’t just invest in the paper, she invested in me. Plus, after the second issue of the OSN came out, I had two or three other subscribers in town.
At first, I had no ideas. I just stared blankly at my notebook, feeling almost as overwhelmed as when I first started. How was I ever going to do this?
One morning I was sitting in our backyard swinging on one of the swings. This is something I still do to this day to relax. Even though we no longer have a swing set, I walk to a playground where I can swing for hours if I need to really clear my mind. On this particular day, I was feeling low and very unmotivated, when I overheard my dad talking to our next-door neighbor, Pam.
“Yeah, Tori has actually raised almost $700. I can’t believe it!” Pam said.
After Pam went back in the house, I went to ask my dad what they were talking about. As it turned out, Pam’s daughter, Tori, was born very prematurely. She spent the first several weeks of her life in the hospital. So as Tori was about to turn eleven, she decided to ask for donations to the neonatal intensive care unit of the hospital where she was born. Pam thought it was a great idea, but no one thought she would be able to raise so much money.
Later that afternoon, I interviewed Tori and sent Izzy, who had taken over the role of photographer for the OSN, to take her picture. As I sat typing in my dad’s office, I caught myself feeling happy. This was the first time I would realize that working at something you love can be a great escape from sadness. It also made me realize how expressing myself through writing felt a lot easier than talking.
Unfortunately, not all my escapes were so healthy. For as long as I can remember, I have loved sweets. There is probably not much science to support the existence of a sweet treat gene, but looking at my family, one definitely has to wonder. My Grammie struggled most of her life with her relationship to food. She loved eating more than anyone I had ever met, and desserts were her favorite. The problem was, she couldn’t really stop herself from eating too much. Sadly, because of this, she became overweight and had health problems like very high blood pressure. Even though we all suspect Grammie ultimately died from sadness and worry, these underlying problems definitely didn’t help. My dad loved sweets almost as much as Grammie. He learned early on, however, that if he was going to eat like that, he would have to be very active. For almost ten years, my dad has run five miles every single morning, without missing one day. As a result, he stays fit even though he eats way too many doughnuts.
In the months following Grammie’s and Grandpa’s deaths, I began eating a lot. I found myself always wanting something sweet. If I couldn’t have that, I wanted bread or pasta. Food felt like something to look forward to—a little bright spot in a day of blah. This would be the beginning of years of struggle: my struggle with food, my health-obsessed mom’s struggle with my eating, the struggle between my sweet-treat-eating dad and my mom’s no-sugar policy.
At this point, I wasn’t yet aware of how sugar affected my mood—I just knew I wasn’t feeling well at all. When I ate these kinds of foods, I didn’t just eat a little. It felt like there was a big hole inside me that I was trying to fill with food, but I never really could. The hole was always there. After I ate this way, I would feel really happy for an hour or so, but then I would feel horrible. It wasn’t that my stomach would hurt (although sometimes it would)—it was that I would feel this horrible combination of anger and sadness. I started yelling and crying more. Any little thing my sisters did made me feel irate. Even something like my parents asking me to clean my room could set me off.
My mom, who is a big believer in food as medicine, immediately made the connection between what I was eating and the outbursts I was having. She knew I had good reason to be feeling sad, but she also recognized that the way I was handling it was making me feel worse. Her solution was to make sure that I always ate only whole foods—nothing processed—and no sugar. This, of course, made me miserable. All my friends ate crappy food, especially Kristen. It was super difficult to be around this and not be able to eat those things too.
School was the worst. It seemed like every week someone was having a birthday party with cupcakes the parents sent in. My mom sent the teacher a box of granola bars for me (and not even the good ones) that I could eat instead. Beyond it being terrible to watch everyone eat cupcakes while I couldn’t, it was totally embarrassing. It made me feel like something was wrong with me. After expressing this to my mom, she eventually came up with a “compromise”: a once-a-week sweet day. We did this for years. One day a week, I could pick anything I wanted and enjoy it. Really, it did little to make me feel better.
