My grandma & I at Long Beach Island

My family will maintain that my grandmother is buried six feet under the ground at Fair View Cemetery in Red Bank, New Jersey. But that’s not true. Not really.

The truth is that she’s alive. More alive than most people in my life. She’s strategically spread herself, clinging to everything in sight like the smoke from the cigarettes she used to smoke.

When I was eight years old, standing in front of an open casket, I stumbled silently over my Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s.

The scents of fresh cut flowers, too much cologne and Mint Milanos distracted my brain, forcing me to start over.  I kneeled until my kneecaps imprinted themselves into the maroon plush, until I wrapped my head around the concept of death.

Back then, my biggest gripe was not being allowed to miss school to attend the funeral.

And then, instead of just abiding by the rules of death — you know, the gone forever part — she played a trick on me. Her presence crept up on me, bleeding into the remaining members of her family.

I should’ve forgotten her. Thirteen years ago. Instead, what I do remember is distorted. Like fragmented pieces of glass that — when glued back together — won’t be enough to reframe a mirror.

My first memory of my aunt is in a hospital room. All the lights are turned off; the glow from the whitewashed hallway is the only light penetrating the darkness.

It’s an intimate moment. A woman just six years older than I am now is hunched over a bed. Her shoulders wrench up and down. I stand back, hoping to fade into the background as she pleads. Bargains with her terminally ill mother not to die.

Motherhood, I’ve come to realize, is a legacy passed on to the next generation. Maybe a mother doesn’t sit her children down and tell them how to behave and how to raise a child, but she prepares them silently.

My grandmother, in fact, grew quite good at sitting her children down and telling them how not to behave.

“Do as I say,” she insisted, pushing vegetables around on her dinner plate but not eating them. “Not as I do.”

I see her in my own mother, who lays on the couch wrapped in a blanket even in the middle of June. Devouring novels of love and morality and conflict as if they were crossword puzzles.

And in my aunt, who believes in the “always have something prepared for dessert” theory. Maybe, with three growing boys, you’re obligated to abide by that rule.

And now, long after she is gone, I see her in my roommate whose parents, ironically, were from Red Bank, too.

“Desserts first,” my grandma would say. And I’d joke about opening a restaurant with the same name.

My roommate believes in relaxing; she’s an expert in it, really. She doesn’t take herself too seriously. And she bakes three times a week.

So the years will pass; the leaves will change colors and the people in my life who most reflect her will grow older. But I will find new ways to find her in the strangers on the sidewalks or the grocer at the store. Her fiery red hair will crop up in someone else’s DNA and her freckled skin will splatter itself across someone else’s cheekbones.

And I will pray that there is a generation dedicated to tough love, desserts first and romance novels.

Because there’s a large piece of that glass stuck inside of me. Absorbed into my blood and clinging to each generation until Cissy Rossetti is a legacy.

Quite frankly, she already is.

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