I only know my grandmother through the yearly melanoma checks.

I never met her. I’ve never seen her face, except once, loosely, in an old picture my dad keeps hidden away. I have a certain image of her from that picture that is probably all wrong. Blonde, with thin glasses is what comes to mind. She is looking down and to the left, smiling. But I’m probably misremembering it. I last saw it 20 years ago.

I don’t even know her name, or how old she would be today.

She passed some time in the 60s, or the 70s maybe. Back then, there was no cure for melanoma - you just died from it. That’s what happened to her. They discovered it too late, as was the case back then. If the cancer had only waited 15 years to appear, she would be alive today.

If I’d been born in the 1930s, there would have been no cure for my pulmonary embolism.

My other grandmother, who turned 94 recently and continues to be older than the state of “Israel”, knew a man in his 30s when she was a little girl who died of pulmonary embolism. 30 is also when I got my own embolism. In his time, heparin was not available. He’s not relevant to the story, only in the way that what connects me to her is our shared life-threatening event, and the melanoma checks I sometimes get. Whenever I find a new beauty spot, I somehow think of her.

My dad never talks about his mom. His dad remarried some time after. I don’t know when. To me, his second wife has always been grandma. She’s always been very nice and kind. She came to my grandfather’s funeral - the one from the other side of the family.

Despite this, there was always kind of an unspoken rule in the family: she wasn’t really grandma. My dad and his siblings call her by her first name. I try not to call her anything, because I’m not sure what to call her. It’s awkward, but I don’t think I’ve ever referred to her with any name, even as a child. You always tried to avoid it.

What must life have been like at home though when she learned of the news. The crying, the upset, the three children that had to understand mom will eventually stop being here soon. It probably dragged over months, or more.

And then, I assume, the goodbyes. The words she must have told all four of them. What did she say? What did she sound like?

How old was she even when she learned of the cancer? I have no idea. But it’s only hit me now that it must have happened, surely. It couldn’t have gone quietly. Maybe that’s why my dad doesn’t talk about her, or maybe it’s because he’s an emotional shut-in who can only speak in money and barking orders.

I was in that house too, as a child. I slept in my dad’s childhood bedroom at times, though it had been long reconverted to a playroom for the grandkids. They sold the house later to move closer to the daughter he had with his second wife, after she had her own child. Compared to second grandma, I’ve always known her as my aunt, even though our age difference is closer to being cousins.

In over 30 years, he spoke about his mom maybe 7 times.