My grandmother died last year. I was sixteen. She lived in a village in Lebanon and I lived in Ottawa, and she had a phone but the connection was bad and she spoke a dialect of Arabic I had let slide because, at thirteen, I had been embarrassed of it.
What I have left of her is a few voicemails on a phone I don't use anymore, two recipes my mother wrote down, and a photograph of her at fourteen, in a courtyard in Beirut, holding a chicken. I have a thousand questions for that fourteen-year-old now. I have none of the answers.
Most of the questions I wish I'd asked her are specific to her — they don't help anyone else. But five of them, I've found, are universal. People say them back to me, almost word for word, when we talk to families on the phone. These are the five.
1. What did your hands remember that you never had to think about?
After enough decades, the body holds memories the mind doesn't track. The folding of dough. The rhythm of chopping. The particular way she scrubbed a pot. Ask her: what does your body know how to do without thinking?
She'll laugh and shrug. Wait. Then she'll say a thing — "oh, my mother taught me to fold a sheet a certain way" — and once she starts, the list won't stop. These small skills are her, distilled. They go with her unless someone learns them.
2. What were you thinking about, the day you left where you came from?
If she immigrated, this question has an answer. The morning she got on the boat, or the plane, or into the back of someone's truck — what was she thinking? What was the last meal? Who was crying? Who wasn't, but should have been?
If she didn't immigrate, ask the same question about the day she left her parents' house. Same shape, same answer. Departure days are some of the most vivid days a person has, and they are almost never asked about by name.
3. Who were you before you became a grandmother?
This is the hardest question to ask, and the most important. By the time you know her, she has been a grandmother for twenty years. She was a mother for thirty years before that. Before all of it, she was a girl in a country, with a name, with a set of plans she made when she was nineteen and nobody alive today has heard.
Ask her. Not gently. Directly. "Who were you, at twenty-two, before everything?" The answer is the answer to who she still is.
4. What would you have cooked for yourself, if you were cooking only for you?
She has cooked for a husband. For children. For grandchildren. For guests. For sick people, for celebrating people, for whoever needed feeding. Ask her: if it had only ever been you, and nobody to please — what would the meals have looked like?
The answer is one of the saddest and most beautiful things you can hear from a grandmother. Sometimes it's a fish dish from her village. Sometimes it's a sweet she stopped making because nobody else liked it. Sometimes it's a meal she has never cooked in her life, but always wanted to.
5. Is there anything you wanted to say to me that you never did?
Save this for the last call you know is coming. Or, if there's no last call, save it for a phone call on a regular Tuesday. Ask it lightly. Mean it heavily.
She may say no. She may say something small. She may say something that changes you. Whatever the answer is, you will be glad you asked. You will be much sadder if you didn't.
These five questions are the ones I will be carrying for the rest of my life because I did not ask them. I'm telling you about them because, if you still can, you should.
There is no version of this where the asking goes badly. The worst thing that happens is she says she doesn't want to answer, and you sit with her instead. The best thing is she tells you something nobody in your family has ever heard.
If she is still here, today is a good day. The thing about today is that nobody knows yet, with full certainty, that it isn't the last one.
Hearth captures the recipes and stories of mothers and grandmothers — by phone, in their language — and binds them into a hardcover cookbook the family can keep.