Wednesday, January 16, 2019 // The Statement
7B
Friday, February 14, 2020 // The Statement
7B

O

ver Winter Break, my mother and I drove 90
minutes to visit the gravesite of my paternal
grandmother Gail, a place neither of us had seen.
We drove around the cemetery in dizzy circles and tra-
versed plots of well-kept grass to find it, searching the site
with only a rough draft of a map found online. I’d always
wanted to visit the site and finally my mother decided she
would be the one to take me, driven by her desire to share
this moment with me and her personal curiosity. My father
politely declined our invitation to join us, smiling at us with
an air of vulnerability, as his mother is a sensitive topic that
pains him to bridge. He lost her when he was young. My
mother and I never had the chance to meet her.
When we’d finally made it, I stood over the dark slate and
fixed my watery eyes on the birth date: February 14. The day
my grandmother’s mother brought her into this earth was
a day filled with love letters, hand holding and chocolate
hearts. This was a day she celebrated with birthday cake,
friends and family. A day that marked another year. A day
she eventually spent with my father. A day full of love — not
just to and from her, but everywhere.
“This is closest I’ve ever been to her,” my mother mut-
tered to the ground through scattered tears. “And the clos-
est I’ll ever be.” I gripped her hand, my other hand curled
around my grandmother’s gold coin necklace dangling from
my neck, my eyes fixated on the “2/14” deeply engraved into
the glossy stone.
Back on my 13th Valentine’s Day, my mother pulled me
aside at the breakfast table. “Valentine’s Day was your
father’s mother’s birthday. Make sure you give him a hug
today and tell him you love him,” she said, cutting into the
pink pancakes my father had made us for breakfast. I had to
pause. I noticed the way she didn’t say “your grandmother,”
because I would immediately think of her mother, a woman
I knew, and not my father’s mother, a woman I never had
the chance to meet, who died before I was born. Perhaps

my parents mutually thought the information of her
birthday to be trivial, but I weighed on every word. My
paternal grandmother Gail was an Aquarius. That was
something I now knew.
My 13th Valentine’s Day was also my freshman year
of high school. The boy who stole my first kiss the previ-
ous summer surreptitiously got my locker combination
from my friends and unlocked it on a clandestine mis-
sion before school. His goal? To be my valentine. Right
before the first bell rang, I bounded through a hallway
of lively, hormonal 13-year-olds to my locker to switch
out my books. Instead, out of my locker tumbled a teddy
bear, chocolates, pink balloons, heart shaped decor and
a deck of cards, which in sloppy handwriting read: 52
things I <3 about you.
My face burned as I struggled to push the over-the-
top gifts back into my locker, forfeiting the idea I’d find
my science binder under all of the pink glitter and heart-
shaped chocolate boxes. I couldn’t pinpoint the embar-
rassment; perhaps it was because this boy wasn’t my
boyfriend, or because I was at an age when embarrass-
ment is common and blending in is much preferred to
attention. As I finally slammed my locker shut, its rusted
door bursting with pink streamers, I turned around and
ran directly into him. Our eye contact was momen-
tary, and I opened my mouth as though I was going to
say something, but instead took off in the other direc-
tion, leaving him standing there, valentine rejected and
alone.
The Valentine’s Days to follow were similarly unsuc-
cessful. During my junior year of high school, my then-
boyfriend dropped a teddy bear off at my house but asked
me if it would be OK if he “please went to hang out with his
friends.” My senior year of high school, my then- “kind of”
boyfriend gave me an assortment of things (a single half-
wilted rose, a mini box of chocolates) he’d just purchased
from a drug store. For both freshman and sophomore year
of college I wore a heart-shaped sweater and ate sushi with
my best friend at 4 p.m., long before any lovebirds would
fill the two top tables at the restaurants. I’m not ashamed
to say we followed the sushi by watching the Fifty Shades
of Grey saga and eating heart shaped Reese’s peanut butter
cups. We laughed until our stomachs hurt, and then both
cried in the darkened theatre during the previews, lament-
ing over recent ex-boyfriends. Those were my best Valen-
tine’s Days yet.
Regardless, I have always had a strange affinity for the
holiday. Normally I’d reserve “fans of Valentine’s Day” for
those in happy, committed or new honeymoon-phase rela-
tionships with plans to drink fizzy cocktails and hold hands
— not the singles who are without sappy memorabilia or
someone to buy them valentine peanut M&Ms. But there’s
something about Valentine’s Day that I love, even as I am
happily single and enjoying my final semester on campus
boyfriend-less. Maybe it’s the Cancer sun or Cancer moon
in me. Maybe it’s my love for poetry and the wonderfully
dizzying idea of romance. Or maybe it’s because I have a
strong affinity for the color pink and any excuse to eat choc-
olate. The truth is, though, I love Valentine’s Day because
the whole world is somehow celebrating my grandmother’s
birthday through their sappy love notes and flower arrange-
ments, even if they don’t know it.
When I was growing up, my father and his brother would
say they thought I looked like “Grammy Gail.” I was com-
pared to the childhood pictures we had from her yearbooks,
and it irked me that I’d never know the woman everyone
who knew her so strongly linked me to. Maybe it’s the name-

sake — Eli Gail — but after a childhood of being told I don’t
really look like anyone in the family, I was relieved to have
someone I took after, even if it was someone I didn’t know.
I spent my young adulthood wondering my way in and
out of Gail’s life, creating a caricature of her in my mind. I
imagine her charismatic and flirtatious yet loyal and true.
The inkling to know her is inexplicable and frustrating. In
my journal I write lists of the things I know about Gail. It’s
always a short list. Sometimes, next to the lists, I write out
the things I know of myself.
When I was growing up, my father never spoke of Gail.
All stories and memories were padlocked behind my father’s
averted gaze whenever her name was mentioned. In my 21
years, I’ve collected facts about her and held them close:
She was a Jewish woman who died of breast cancer, with
a spitfire personality and a heart too big for this world, and
she left behind a collection of gold coins of various sizes that
hang in my mother’s closet and around my neck. I’m not
sure where the rest of her things are. My father was never
willing to tell me or my family any details about his mother’s
life and we never asked. I always assumed this was because
it was too painful to dredge the emotional past to speak of
the days when she was around.
I’ve always been infatuated by Gail in a clandestine way,
worrying that it’s inappropriate to have such nostalgia for a
woman I’ve never met, who everyone speaks of scarcely yet
with vulnerability and affection. On a few separate occa-
sions I convinced my father to speak of her. Once, I was eat-
ing breakfast with my dad and I mentioned I wanted to see
Greece before I died. He stopped what he was doing, a fork-
ful of egg suspended in the air and said, “My mother loved
Greece.” I was so caught off guard by the casual nature of his
comment that I didn’t respond. He commenced eating his
eggs and said nothing else. Perhaps if I’d followed up with
another question about Greece or his mother, we could’ve
had some riveting, life-affirming conversation about her. I
didn’t, because that wasn’t my relationship with my dad —
it isn’t my relationship with my dad. We don’t dredge emo-
tional vats of our pasts in search of answers. And I wasn’t
used to him ever saying the words “my mother.”
I will never know my grandmother. I’ll never hold her
hands. I’ll never learn about my Jewish heritage from her
or hear her voice. She’ll never attend my graduation or one
day, my wedding. But Valentine’s Day is her day. Despite
my romantic mishaps, being single or feeling alone on the
Valentine’s Days of my past, Feb. 14 has always been more
than the acknowledgement of romance. Valentine’s Day
manifests itself as a different kind of celebration for me — a
love for my mother, a woman committed to bridging the gap
between myself and my heritage; my father, who has been
my best friend since birth; and my grandmother, a woman I
know watches over me, though we’ve never met face to face.
But a part of her will always be here: in my father, in the
gold coin necklaces, in the stories we barely tell, in me. With
the onset of the February sun and the days edging toward
Valentine’s Day — a day a single person would typically
loathe — I think about my grandmother, my sweet, uncom-
mon Valentine, a woman whose life began on a day filled
with affection and infatuation.
As I approach this Valentine’s Day, writing from the last
bedroom I will ever have in Ann Arbor, before my life sup-
posedly begins, I’ve recognized that my singleness and lack
of a valentine isn’t so lonely. It is in the span of the past year
that my grandmother and I have somehow grown closer.
She is my valentine, on a skinny chain around my neck —
all the way from wherever the best people go — somewhere
near the sun.

On Valentine’s Day, I think of my Grandmother

BY ELI RALLO, STATEMENT COLUMNIST

PHOTO COURTESY OF ELI RALLO