It being close to Christmas and my late grandmother’s birthday, I’ve been thinking about family members that are no longer here. I’ve had a sciatica injury and been a little bit laid up in bed, stoned on pain meds (thank you, pain meds) and unable to sit at my desk and write much. So here’s a little piece of flash nonfiction about my Grandmother Carol, typed with one finger on my phone to entertain you all.

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I was raised Catholic. One day my grandmother, took me and my cousin Karen to church with her, and they were holding confession so that parishioners could cleanse their souls and be ready to take communion during mass. I did not want to go to confession, mainly because confession is scary and medieval, and weird, and you have to sit in the dark and talk to the priest through a wooden screen and tell him all your sins. (This was before social media, where you can now tell your sins to strangers 24/7.) But Grandma was not one to be deterred when she got an idea in her head, and she convinced/guilted/dragged me into going into the confessional booth with her so she could show me how not-scary it was.

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We get in there in the dark and Grandma goes through the whole bless-me-father-for-I-have-sinned rigamorol, and starts confessing her meager sins, ending by telling the priest, "And I swear like a Goddamned trooper, Father. But there's not a Goddamned thing you or God can do about it, so don't even bother telling me I shouldn't."

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Words to Goddamn live by.

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I'm pretty sure my cousin heard my gasp from all the way outside the confessional where Grandma had left her to wait for us. (I don't remember how Karen managed to escape the confessional, but she had a knack for getting away with crap, being the fourth out of five grandchildren, and the confessional was probably too small for all three of us.)

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The priest said nothing in response to my grandmother's swearing, just gave her absolution and a few Hail Marys as penance, which I don't remember Grandma saying. I'm sure she thought Mary wouldn't mind her blowing them off, they having a bond of motherhood in common, but it might have been that I was too busy whispering to Karen about what Grandma had said to the priest to notice Grandma praying her penance.

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I can't overestimate how much my grandmother telling the priest that she was basically going to do whatever she thought was appropriate - regardless of what any authority figure's opinion of her behavior might be - meant to me as a girl growing up at that time. Karen and I still laugh over the Grandma-in-confession story and believe me, Karen inherited the swear-and-defy-authority gene, too.

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One of these days I'm going to embroider Grandma's words on a Goddamned throw pillow to put on my couch. Maybe I'll make one for Karen, too.