This Post Is About Gwyneth Paltrow's Cookies, But Not Really

In the preface to her recipe for “Granddad Danner’s Favorite Peanut Butter Cookies,” Gwyneth Paltrow tells us that though her grandfather “passed away when I was seven[…]I can still remember him with his thick shock of white hair eating these cookies with a glass of milk.”

I actually made these cookies this summer – and it’s a very basic recipe (flour, other typical dry ingredients, a stick of butter, ¾ cup peanut butter, dark and light brown sugar, one egg, vanilla, and peanut butter chips), so I won’t bother doing a walkthrough, but they are delicious. Anyway, I was making them, and it was a week after my own grandfather had died.


I know. That was five months ago, and this is the first some of you are hearing of it. And there are reasons for that – the biggest being that this largely stopped being a personal blog a long time ago.

Another is that 34 is a difficult age at which to grieve for a grandparent. I’m at a point in my life where my friends are starting to lose parents more often – not what you’d call regularly yet, but no longer under circumstances that require you to say things like “suddenly” or “out of the blue” or “but s/he was so young!”

Each of my parents has lost a sibling – one too early and one far too early. My other uncle has lost his wife. Two of my friends have lost very young children and another is losing her eldest in a particularly slow and terrible way.

Faced with all of that, it feels selfish to wallow in mourning for a grandfather who had 93 good years, capped by a few months of declining health that made it obvious that the end was speedily approaching. It was not sudden. It was not out of the blue. He was not so young – even though for years he’d managed to fake us out by seeming younger than he had any business being.

But the cookies. I kept coming back to that sentence while I was baking – it’s the last line of the introductory text, so it would catch my eye every time I glanced back to see how much dark brown sugar or what order to do things in – and I found myself thinking that I couldn’t even imagine losing my grandfather at seven, and not having a lifetime’s worth of memories with him.

And that’s when I stopped cold, and then burst into tears.

Because I had lost a grandfather at seven – or two months shy of it, really. How could I possibly have forgotten that? And it was sudden, and it was out of the blue, and at 68, he wasn’t so young…but he was still too young. At the very least, he was a damn sight younger than 93.


At that point, I started trying to remember my other grandfather, and I found that I had a very hard time sorting out what I actually remembered versus what I’d been told or seen pictures of. After giving it considerable thought, I’m only confident that one memory of him is really my own – the time he showed me my grandmother’s driver’s license, which he carried in his wallet (she’d died before I was born).

Compare that to the grandfather who just passed. The one for whom I remember a lifetime of bellowed “Hello there, young lady”-s, either when he entered a room or when I heard his voice on the phone; the way he gestured slightly with his fork in small circles while telling a story; the fact that he’d said “et la bas!” as an expression of disgust for decades, and was shocked but amused when a French dinner guest told him that it only meant “hey, you over there.”

But as differently as I’m able to remember them, I feel the same sense of unreality about both their deaths. At just shy of 7, you don’t fully comprehend what death is, and don’t entirely understand that you’re never going to see that person again. At 34, you understand death and can even prepare yourself for its coming, but that doesn’t mean you’re any better capable of realizing – in the sense of making it real to yourself – that someone who’s always been in your world just isn’t anymore.

Suddenly. Out of the blue. Because whether you have weeks to prepare and know exactly what’s going on, or a sudden phone call comes in the middle of a family gathering and you understand the words people are saying but not what they mean, losing someone is always like having the chair kicked out from underneath you.

One grandfather would’ve been 94 years old today. And Saturday – yes, Christmas Eve -- will be the 28th anniversary of the other’s death.

I don’t really know how to miss either of them. And at the same time, right now I miss them both terribly.