THE BIBLE
“...she loved her things and she loved us, and it seemed only natural that we should all be together.”
When I met Cody, he felt too good to be true. Handsome, funny, talented. Also tall. Also emotionally available. Also someone I would have pushed away months, maybe even weeks earlier. By some miracle, I didn’t push him away. He didn’t push me away either, and so we fell in love and did what falling-in-love people do—we met each others’ families.
My family, which consisted primarily of my mother, was easily won over. With his family, all Texans, I felt like an outsider, a weirdo: an opinionated California vegetarian hippie, a short-lived-phase kind of girl, not a future wife. But Grammie wasn’t picking up the baggage I was putting down. She reached across the table at The Cheesecake Factory and grabbed my hand and immediately put me at ease.
We didn’t agree on some of the big things—politics, namely; on that, we agreed to disagree and left it behind us. We did agree, joyfully, on the biggest thing—Cody, and how much we loved him. Grammie was never cheap with her love. Not with anyone, not in my experience, but definitely not with Cody. Even before I married him, that generosity made its way, by extension, to me.
For our flights home from Texas, she made me vegetarian-friendly pimiento cheese sandwiches instead of ham. She went out of her way to talk to me on the phone and ask how I was doing, and to buy me a scarf I love and wear to this day. She made it a point to learn about me and why exactly I was estranged from so much of my family. And through stories and objects, she shared her kin with me.
As long as I knew Grammie, she talked about the inevitably of her passing and what she would leave behind and to whom. She would have liked us to crate up her house and move it in its entirety from the outskirts of Dallas to Los Angeles. She knew that wasn’t possible, but still, she loved her things and she loved us, and it seemed only natural to her that we should all be together. This was especially true when it came to the family Bible.
“I want you two to have this Bible,” she’d say. “It’s an heirloom. We want to keep it in the family.” She never chafed at the fact that we didn’t go to church. The Bible wasn’t for reading—it was a symbol, her way of saying, “You belong.” She would pull it from the bookcase, its cover falling apart, its pages yellowed, its front page inscribed by Cody’s namesake, C.J. Shelton. “Don’t let anyone snatch it,” she’d say. “It’s yours.” I told her, “We won’t forget, Grammie, we’ll take it with us.” I didn’t enjoy conversations about her death, but I came to understand that my promises gave her peace of mind.
Grammie and I shared the position of being Sheltons by marriage. She taught me, by her example, how to be an essential part of something that wasn’t automatically mine through birth. In the ten years we knew each other, she was the closest thing to a caring grandparent I’d ever experienced, and it still brings me to tears to remember how lovingly she held our first son before she passed. If religion is about what you believe—well, Grammie believed in the love of family. If a Bible is a guide, she was mine.
—Alyson Shelton
Alyson Shelton’s writing appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Ms., Brevity Blog, The Rumpus and elsewhere, and she is currently at work on a memoir in essays. Her Instagram Live series, “Where I'm From,” is inspired by George Ella Lyon’s poem of the same name; watch and participate @byalysonshelton.