Essay

Meaningful Mementos

By: Diana Raab, 06/12/2019

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Sometimes we receive meaningful mementos from loved ones that can change our lives. This has happened to me a few times, but my most meaningful memento was my grandmother’s retrospective journal depicting her life as an orphan in Poland during World War I. Her parents died of cholera when she was eleven years old, about the same age I was when she took her life with an overdose of sleeping pills in my childhood home.
After my grandmother died, my parents continued to live in that home for thirty more years. When it came time to pack up and move, they stumbled across my grandmother’s journal depicting her life as an orphan. In view of my close relationship with my grandma, my mother gifted me with the journal. Only after reading it did I fully understand the deep roots of her depression, which tormented her during her entire life, and eventually led to her suicide at the age of sixty-one.
I tucked the journal away until many years later when I was diagnosed with cancer. I wanted to see if she’d committed suicide because of a cancer diagnosis. She died in the 1960s—a time when discussing cancer was considered taboo.
Although I did not learn that she had cancer, while reading her journal I felt reconnected with her through her words. I was reminded of how she taught me to type on her black Remington typewriter perched on the vanity in her room, and how the experience planted the seeds of my writing passion in me.
“Have a seat,” she’d said on that momentous day, pointing to her vanity chair. “Typing is a handy skill for a girl to have. Plus, you never know what kinds of stories you’ll have to tell one day.”
She stood behind me, her image reflected in the mirror in front of me. She took my right hand and positioned it on the second row of keys from the bottom, carefully placing one finger on each letter, repeating the same gesture with my left hand.
“This is the correct position for your fingers. When you become a good typist, you won’t even have to look at the letters while typing. Let’s see if you can type your name.”
With my left middle finger, she had me press on the “D.” Then we moved to the right middle finger and moved up a row to type an “I.” Then my pinkie pressed the “A,” and then something really tricky had to happen—I had to move my right thumb down to the bottom row to type an “N.” Then my left pinkie typed an “A.” After each letter I glanced up at the paper to see the results of my efforts. After reaching the last “A,” I proudly looked up at my grandmother’s face in the mirror.
Those typing lessons formed the basis for my lifelong commitment to the written word. While I no longer have that typewriter, I have my grandmother’s journal in safekeeping and will treasure it for the rest of my life.

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