So, October is almost over. How do I know? IT’S MY BIRTHDAY! Like my birthday itself, I had a hard time with my story today. It’s not that I’m having a tough time getting older, it’s just that with the fires and evacuations and power loss (I HAVE POWER NOW!!!) it just really overshadowed the celebration of another trip around the sun. But as inevitably as my birthday came, so comes today’s story. Who would you choose to meet?
My grandmother was a witch.
I thought that was just something my dad used to say when he was fed up with having to do another chore for her. “That witch can landscape her own yard with her sorcery!” My mom just sighed and reminded him, “And what do you think her daughter is?”
He died when I was a teenager. Later, my mom explained it was true – not that my Nain should or could do her own landscaping, that she was a witch.
“So she can do spells and stuff?” I asked.
“She can…” she replied in an equivocating tone, “To an extent.” And she talked about the Welsh traditions that powered her spells didn’t hold much power in this country. “She’ll talk to you about it herself when she’s ready.”
She almost died without being ready.
Like, literally, she was on her deathbed. Congestive heart failure. She hadn’t spent a night in the hospital her entire life and now it looked like she would be spending her last nights there. At least that’s what the doctors said. Nain had other ideas. All of us were there – Mom, me, my aunt, her three boys – and Nain said “All of ya, step out for a minute. I have to talk to my girl, Carys.” That’s what she called me. Yeah, I know, my name is Alison. Carys is the diminutive of my middle name Ceridwen and it was the only name my Nain ever called me.
“Mom,” my mother started, “We’re all here for you…”
“Did I stutter?!” she said firmly. “Out! All of ya!” her Old World accent still distinct after most of a lifetime in America.
No one said anything but filed out of the room quickly until it was just my Nain and me.
“Carys, come here, dear.” I did. “What’dya know about me being as gwrach?”
“As what, Nain?”
“Gwrach. Witch. Don’t deny you’d heard about it. Yer ma told me she’d told you.”
“Nothing beyond what she told me, Nain. She just said you were a witch and that you’d tell me about it when you’re ready.”
She took in a deep, contemplative breath and broke into a coughing fit that wracked her thin frame. I was about to call for a doctor when she held her hand up in restraint. She stopped coughing, drew another long breath that wracked as she took it in, then she let it out carefully.
“I guess I thought I’d have all the time in the world,” she smiled. “But I don’t. I don’t even have past sunset,” her gaze went to the window.
“Nain, the doctors said you had a few days–“
“Hush, Carys, they don’t know what they speak of. A few hours is all. And that’s fine. It’s been a good long life. I’m ready. Well,” her eyes fell on me, “Almost ready.
“Carys, the tradition of witch is matrilinear – only woman to woman. But it skips a generation, always. So, yer ma was skipped. But you…” her smile turned mischievous as she pointed a bony finger at me. “You’ll inherit the mantle, Carys.”
“What… what does that mean?”
“Oh, I’m ‘fraid to say not much. This land is bereft of memory and the old world doesn’t hold enough sway to really allow you to do much. With one exception.”
“Oh?”
“The right of the Pentuple.”
“The pentup… what?”
“Pentuple, dear. I don’t have a lot of breath left. Pay attention. You’re 21, yes?”
I nodded.
“Every five years of age – 5, 10, 15, 20, 25” she put emphasis on the 25 as the other milestone ages were past. “Every five years of age you are granted the Right of the Pentuple. In the moments before the clock strikes midnight and your birthday begins, think of someone who isn’t living that you want to spend your day with. Anyone dead is fair game. Do you want to spend the day talking philosophy with Aristotle? Better brush up on your Greek, because for the next 24 hours you’ll get to talk with him. Maybe you’d prefer an English speaker like Amelia Earhart – you wrote that report on her in fourth grade, right?”
“How do you remember that?”
She winked at me. “At ten to twelve on the 29th you focus on dear old Amelia and you can spend your birthday asking her about aviation, her crash, whatever you want – you’ve got her ghost for the day!”
She got serious for a moment and said, “There are some caveats, Carys. This is for you and you alone. Ya can’t have a party of it and bring yer friends around. Just. You. You can’t take them out on the town – ghosts don’t travel well. Get comfortable because those 24 hours are in the same place.”
“I don’t know what to say…” I said honestly.
“Well, you’ve got the better part of four years to think about your first Pentuple. Now give your Nain a kiss and get the lot of ‘em back in here to say goodbye.”
I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and then went out to let my family know to go back in. My mom didn’t believe me when I told her Nain said she wasn’t going to last past the sunset. But as the shadows in the room grew longer Nain’s strength faded.
“I’m going to take a nap, I think,” she said, and everyone said their goodbyes to let her rest. I couldn’t keep the tears from falling down my cheeks. “There now, girl,” she said. “It’s not forever.”
Mom told her she would be in the waiting room if she needed anything, then she kissed Nain on the forehead before following me out the door. A few minutes after we all left her heart stopped.
Losing Nain was hard. Losing my dad was brutal, but it was a slow decline from cancer – by the end it was something of a relief, as terrible as that sounds. But Nain… she’d been such an important part of my life I didn’t appreciate fully until she was gone.
Even four years later I thought of her daily, which is why on the eve of my 25th birthday it was she I focused on. I was living on my own in a shitty studio apartment in the flight path of SFO. I’d just broken up with my boyfriend and even if I had finished mourning my Nain, I felt I needed her then. And I had so many questions about this whole witch thing.
I stared at the alarm clock willing it to strike midnight. When the numbers flipped over, I was delighted to hear her Welsh lilt, “I told you it wouldn’t be forever!”
I leapt from my bed and ran into her arms. Real arms! “You’re really here!”
“Well, what’d you expect?”
“Oh, Nain, it’s so good to have you here! We have so much to catch up on!”
“Well, girl, you’ve got twenty-three hours and fifty-eight minutes. Let’s get going!”
And we did. And it was wonderful. We talked about being a witch – she recommended books and places in Wales I needed to go to for research. And we talked about life – mine now and hers then. She showed me the recipes from my childhood that she never wrote down. She even sang me a lullaby she used to when I was a kid. It was a needed catnap. And as midnight approached, I kissed her on the forehead and said goodbye. But it was a happy goodbye because we truly used every minute we had together.
That birthday had a profound impact on my life. Part of it was the ability to let go of my grief, part of it was having the interim time to think about what I wanted to talk to my grandmother about. Part of it, too, was finding out how to become a better witch, a task I took to heart and certainly changed the tenor of my life. I didn’t quit my job and start riding brooms, but I spent my idle time reading books about witchcraft and I traveled to Wales and joined a community I hadn’t known existed.
It also helped me come out. I talked to Nain a little about my sexuality – something I’d always been afraid to even bring up at all when she was alive, and we had a lively conversation that was supportive and encouraging.
As my thirtieth birthday came around, I tried to think about who I wanted to meet. There were a number of important women in the Witch community who I would love to pick their brain. Then there a number of artists who I considered, like Picasso or Van Gogh (obviously), but also Frida Kahlo or Georgia O’Keeffe. I’d recently finished Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography and I thought that would be fascinating.
Ultimately, though, on the eve of my thirtieth birthday I thought of my dad. He died when I was barely in high school and I never got to meet him as an adult. When I heard, “Hey Pumpkin,” it brought me back to that awkward teenager, and we spent the next 24 hours getting to know each other as people. Have you ever came out to your dead dad before? It’s a weird experience, let me tell you!
Unlike after my day with my grandmother was over, it took me a few months to unpack and re-grieve my dad. He was a new person to me now, and I had to both reconcile that with the person I knew as dad as well as let go of this really interesting, complicated, person who screwed things up from time to time and was terrible with money. It didn’t change my life as much as help me re-order it.
And it drew me closer to my mom – if that’s possible – because I got to meet the man she fell in love with and forged a family with. I felt I knew her in ways I never knew, that she could never tell me.
That was before they found her breast cancer. I was 34 and she was having a really tough time with the chemo treatments. As my birthday neared the doctors worried the cancer wasn’t disappearing as they’d hoped and her body was just wrecked.
And so it was on the eve of my birthday I struggled to think of who I wanted to spend the next 24 hours with. I went through the lists I’d made over the years. Eleanor Roosevelt was a strong contender. Malcom X, too, but I’m not sure how he’d feel about a white woman summoning him… Ultimately, though, I just wanted to be with my mom.
And when the clock struck twelve, my mom walked in and said, “Oh my god, I’m dead?”
No, I’m just kidding! That’s so messed up of me! That didn’t happen at all! No, I didn’t kill my mom by thinking of her! Wow, sorry, I had to do that, though! No, my mom is fine. I didn’t make her a ghost by thinking about her. I conjured no one and spent the day with her. We ate cake. We spent quality time together and when the day ended… I still had my mom.
