Chapter 94 Deli
Deli
“Rosemary McDonnell was not easy to love—to understand, or pin down, or wrap your arms around. Her margins were messy, despite her crisp blouses and marble floors.
We do not have many good stories about complicated women. They’re not often allowed the roles of heroes or leading ladies.
Women who are easy to love are simple. Predictable. Compliant.
My grandmother was none of those things.
She was born with fire in her belly when little girls were supposed to be quiet and demure. But no matter how hard she tried, Rosemary smoldered.
And sometimes her love could burn. It could lick down her arms and scorch the things she held so tightly. Sometimes being loved by Rosemary McDonnell felt like being trapped in a house on fire.
But sometimes? It felt like the sun. Like the sun had come after years of darkness. Being loved by my grandmother could feel like being touched by the softest, warmest light there was.
On her best days, she was pure sunlight. I’d like to believe if she had the choice, she would have spent every single second looking over the people she loved—helping them blossom. Helping them thrive.
Maybe it’s not fair to be loved by someone like that—to never know if you were gonna bloom or be burned at her touch.
But it also couldn’t have been fair to only have a chained up heart that wouldn’t go out.
Maybe the unfairness happened to us all—most of all, my complicated, dimensional, wild-hearted grandmother, who thought herself a failure for burning her whole life.
Is it jarring to talk about her like this?
Yeah, I know. But to really love someone, you have to see them.
And to capture a woman like Rosemary—to paint her portrait and coax her out of words—is not a task for the fainthearted.
She was a lioness. An untamed wind. And she would have scolded me in the car on the way home if she’d heard me tell you that she was an easy, simple, soft thing.
Frankly, I’m afraid she’d haunt me in a pair of Jimmy Choos.
Some of you knew her as a friend. Some as a lover.
Some as a mother. And I’d bet some, even, as an enemy.
I think she’d enjoy you being here the most, sitting in a church while I monologue about a woman you are still thinking about—she would call that a win.
I’m sure there is more than one person here who got into a tussle with Rosemary McDonnell and limped away, nursing a wound they didn’t know was possible, while she smiled and straightened her dress.
She liked to win, didn’t she? Never afraid of a fight. Especially when love felt so often like a battle. I know I’ve come away bloody. Her daughters have, too.
When my grandmother loved someone, she made sure they couldn’t wander too far. She lived her life trying to protect.
And yes, Rosemary hung on a little too tight.
It’s such a task to become when you’re on a short leash, isn’t it?
That is what makes me the saddest today.
Not that she’s gone, or rather, done up exquisitely in this ridiculous, on-brand bombshell of a casket, but that she was a dimensional woman who wasn’t allowed a dimensional life—to learn a dimensional love.
She did the best she could with what she had.
She did the best she could with what she knew.
But . . . what a waste.
Because the truth of Rosemary McDonnell, my grandmother, is this:
She was brilliant. And in another life she could have been a million and one brilliant things.
Maybe she should have never been a wife or a mother, but a pilot—with wings to take her wherever adventure called.
Maybe she should have been a scientist, who took that signature bulldog fight straight to the problem and latched on until she discovered a cure.
Maybe she should have been a novelist—tucked away in rooms full of oak, writing about the string of lonely men who still pined for her in echoing places.
She was hungry. For life, for art, for experience.
There is a world, I imagine, where Rosemary McDonnell had baguettes with French butter in Paris, cappuccinos and table wine in Roman squares, Dutch cheeses from a wrapped cloth on the canals of Amsterdam.
There is a world where she wore smudges of paint on her skin from the hands of the artist who called her muse.
There is a world where she stood at the bow, splashed with sea spray as a scarf whipped in the wind behind her, her cherry lips pulled wide with joy.
There is a world, I imagine, where she knew her hunger wasn’t wrong.
There is a world where Rosemary was a living, messy thing covered in bruises and scars from the times she tried and failed and tried again.
And still, even in this one, she was a force of nature. She could change you forever with a single, breathtaking, brutal day of being wrapped in the fire of her arms.
So no, I cannot tell you my grandmother was easy to love. And neither, I think, am I. But she didn’t have any wild women to look up to and consider a hero. Thanks to her, I do.
The night my grandma told us she was dying, I was so mad. I was so mad. Then she braved a storm—literally—to sit me down and ask my anger its name.
My grandmother, with her eighty-something-year-old body and her defiant, courageous heart, sat with her feet dangling over a cliffside beside me, passing a wineglass that was half rainwater back and forth. And she took my chin in her hand, and said:
‘Promise me, Delilah—you will choose. No matter how scary life gets, you have to be who you are on purpose. You still have time to choose. So, choose.’
No, Rosemary McDonnell was not an easy woman to love.
And thank god, thank god, for that.”