The chart said that she came into the Emergency Department after an overdose. An older woman, disheveled, who had been found down on the ground. She had a history of schizophrenia and not taking her meds. The Emergency Department stabilized her and then admitted her to psychiatry. On paper, she was like so many other homeless patients: chronic psychosis and layers of trauma buried under ICD codes that adorned her chart.
I can’t delete her voicemails. They span over a decade of my life and offer a lifeline to a woman who shaped it.
My grandma wasn’t related to me; she was a customer at the bank where my mom worked in Las Vegas. She chose to love my mom and, eventually, my brother and me.
I spent my childhood chasing her cat, Marmalade, around the house and telling stories with a flashlight under my chin. She taught me to knit using a mirror—because “lefties knit, too.” She made sure my brother and I learned to play the piano, like all her grandchildren.
When we moved to Vermont and later to California, she called my mom every day. Pictures of us, two brown children, sat beside photos of her own grandchildren on her nightstand.
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