and I had become painfully aware that there was so much we didn’t know about our parents’ lives, and our grandmother’s. What did we know about our Gran’s life before Westboro? My sisters and I had begun interviewing her almost immediately after I spoke my treason to Grace. We’d file across the backyard in the evening, past the yellow slide and the pool filled with splashing cousins, and into the church. We’d find Gran upstairs in her bedroom next to the church library where Gramps held a Bible study at 7:30 each morning. At eighty-six, our grandmother was so quiet and gentle. Smaller than I’d ever seen her because of the deep curve in her spine. Stooped with age. She’d lie on her bed, and Grace would lie next to her, Bekah on the floor at the foot of the bed and me at its head. I’d switch on my iPhone’s recorder, and we’d take turns asking questions, and I’d try not to choke at the thought of losing my Gran, at the tsunami of guilt washing over me for even thinking of betraying her.
I started recording everything. Hymn-singing practices. The sounds of our monthly birthday parties. Evening Bible study. My mother’s stories about my siblings and me when we were young. A prayer she said for me. The din inside the van on picket trips. Bekah reading aloud. The repartee of my little brothers. Even if I somehow got them back later—even if they eventually left—all the years of their little-boy voices would be gone.
An endless stream of photos. A family kickball game. Mom and Luke getting ready to walk to school one morning. My parents holding hands as they walked through a department store. A family visit to our favorite art museum in Kansas City. Milkshake parties with Gran and Gramps. Walks to the park with my nieces and nephew. The front porch where Grace and I ate breakfast each morning. A trip out for snow cones with Luke.
In those months, every joyful experience became a torture that left Grace and me in tears and gasping for breath. We’d huddle together on my bed like that, trying to remember what it was like before all this. What it was like to be happy without the inescapable sense that we were watching the slow, excruciating deaths of everyone we loved. I began obsessively taking notes to chronicle every moment. I filled notebooks with descriptions of routine interactions, terrified of losing even a single one. As if clinging to these memories might alleviate the agony. As if recording it all could keep them from slipping from my grasp.
I made a list entitled “Funny/Nice Things Said During Hugs.” Gran, on how she could always count on me to smell good. Gramps, on how my curls in his face made it difficult to breathe—how he was going to drown in them someday. Mom, on how she didn’t mind being smothered by them. Dad, on how he loved it when I finished his sentences. “I love you, Mimi,” he said. It was the name Luke had given me as a toddler, when he couldn’t pronounce mine correctly. “We’re very fortunate to have you as a daughter.” I wrote it down before he could regret it. Before he could take it back. Before he could take down the photos of me that hung on the walls, before he could repurpose my bedroom, before he could spend the rest of his life erasing me from his memory as much as possible.
I started to clean out my room. I had never moved anywhere in my life, and I didn’t know how anyone ever did it. It took weeks, because I pored over everything. Old photo albums. Shoeboxes full of birthday cards and thank you notes I’d been saving since elementary school. I scrutinized every page of the baby book my father had been maintaining for me since I was born. He added to it every year, and it was full to bursting by now, outgrowing the three-inch leather binder he’d bought to expand it. Our family grew larger each time I flipped to a new page, until I came to something I didn’t recognize. A note my father had slipped in two months earlier, back in August.
Dear Miss Megan,
Thank you for all the kind things you do for me. I love you dearly. I don’t say either of those things enough. We are so fortunate. Your mother and I love you so much!