By Kimberly Ford Chisholm

Why—When Will was diagnosed—I just wanted to talk to Nona

There is an understanding among the four kids in my family:  I was our mom’s mom’s favorite.

Nona—Mary-Ellis Borglum Vhay—was a pistol, gorgeous and extroverted.  She was born in 1916 in Connecticut to a mother who was a writer and Ph.D. who could speak seven languages, and a sculptor-father who would move his family to the Black Hills where he would carve Mount Rushmore.

Yes, my great grandfather was the man with enough ambition and confidence and talent to carve Mt. Rushmore.  Nona was nothing if not her father’s daughter.

Instead of earning multiple degrees as had her mother, at eighteen Nona married her father’s best friend, who was twice her age, only to leave him six months later, not because she wasn’t desperately in love, but because it turned out he was gay.

Nona found serious romance again in my grandfather, a debonair Santa Barbara native, with whom she settled in Nevada where the living was wild and the duck hunting unparalleled.

Ever since I was nine and flew alone on a airplane for the first time, I spent at least a few weekends each year in Nevada with my feisty, irreverent grandmother. Each time she pulled me to her and told one of her many friends that I was “her image,” I felt happier even than when she stopped for ice cream right when Baskin Robins opened at ten in the morning or when she told me the bits of advice that made me feel worldly and worthwhile.

We talked on the phone at least weekly, 775-825-2489 being the first phone number I ever memorized.

The letters we wrote back and forth are some of my most prized possessions, bested only by the white box of love notes from a dozen “beaux”—as Nona called them—that she had accumulated throughout her life, the box secured with a red ribbon and labeled in her distinctive handwriting: For Kimberly, Do Not Open!

When she was eighty-six, she took her life.  She was like that.  She had begun to forget important things and repeat mundane questions and she would have none of it.

I think about her every day.

Just last week, when we were at Lake Tahoe for Christmas, a place that makes us all think of our grandparents because they lived just on the other side of the Sierra Nevada, my sister Ellis said she was going to bring back “Spit!” as the satisfying but kid-friendly expletive that our grandmother favored.

“Yeah!” I said.  “And we should bring back ‘Puddin’’! Remember how Nona always called us ‘Puddin’’?”

“Nona,” my sister smiled, “never called me Puddin’.”

When Will was diagnosed with T1D, Nona had been dead for nine years.

Her cashmere sweaters were in my closet and her cubist paintings on our walls and the minute I began to understand what we were facing with T1D, I was struck by an almost visceral need to pick up the phone and dial her number.

I wanted to hear her voice and be able to tell her that something horrible was happening in my life.

I’m not sure what I wanted her to say.

This wouldn’t be like the summer when I was eleven and my cousins were spending August with us and I was sure my mother loved them more than me.  From where I crouched in the dog food cabinet, the telephone at the end of its stretchy yellow cord, Nona was the only one who could convince me that I was wrong.

It wouldn’t be like the time all my high school friends were going to the dance I wasn’t going to—my parents having sent me to the girls’ school I would love by the end of the semester.  Nona, ultimately, was the one to make me truly believe that I was better off going to the drive-in with my brothers and sister.

When Will was diagnosed, I felt a need to talk to my grandmother because I wanted someone to make me feel better—really better.

I wanted to come home from the hospital to find a letter from her in the mailbox.

I wanted to walk into their Nevada foyer and smell her Chanel No. 5 and have her hug me and hear her call me Puddin’.

I wanted my grandmother—like she had so many times before—to make things right.  I wanted her to make the disease go away.

But Nona isn’t alive.

And no one—not yet—can make type 1 disappear.