By Julie D. Lillis
I strode nose-first into the darkened room, where my new patient lay sleeping. I was twenty years old and a newly certified nurse’s aide, working a summer job I took to help pay college tuition. The patient lay flat on her back in bed, eyes closed and sunken, skin a disturbing off-white, the pink drained from her body. A musky smell hit me hard, a sultry, overpowering odor. But it was not expensive French perfume, nor fancy men’s cologne. It was the scent of slowly rotting flesh. It was the smell of cancer gone wild. It was the odor of my Nanna.
She’d lingered in bed, too, when I was nine years old, body wracked with untreated cancer. That was the way she wanted it. Not the cancer, of course (who wants that?), but a dying devoid of doctors.
She was a Christian Scientist, like her mother before her and her son, my dad, after her. She was the most fervent of them all, clinging to the hope of healing as if it were a life raft. She would be healed by God, she thought, or she would simply slip away trying.
As a young child, I associated two smells with my Nanna: lavender and that awful musk. She loved lavender, as I do, and sprayed it liberally on herself. She doused her dresser drawers with the perfume, spritzing them regularly, and stuffed fresh lavender sachets among her sweaters. She smelled like a lavender factory, which was a good thing once the cancer took hold.
Wildly reproducing cells, unrestrained by surgery or chemo or radiation, gobble up healthy tissue. The body surrenders bit by bit, cell by cell, and the flesh turns black. Her breasts—the origin of the cancer— were never voluptuous. But then they became blackened by rot, and the smell was so strong that in the end days, my aunt would run the shower to camouflage the sound of her own vomiting. I smelled that Nanna smell as I walked into my patient’s room, and realized with a start that Nanna’s musky scent had been an alarm bell none of us had sensed for years.
It is strange how evocative smell can be, how a subtle scent—or a strong one—can catapult us into the past.
My other grandmother, who lived to 98, loved perfume, particularly Replique. A special occasion meant a full-on spray of it from her antique perfume atomizer, kept on a glass tray atop her dresser. A regular old day also meant a generous poof of lavender bath powder from the swan’s-down puff I was eventually allowed to use. She trailed perfume and powder in her wake, moving from room to room while lavender and Replique lingered behind her. I liked just being next to her, inhaling deeply her unique blend of fragrance, and I looked forward to the day that I, too, could wear perfume as magnificently as she did.
They were strong and capable women, no virgins to hardship. Nanna’s husband, my grandfather, had sallied off when she was in her forties, leaving behind two young children. She told them he had a new job that had catapulted him to Chicago, but he had not “invited” her along. We buried the truth along with them, but I do know he loved his bachelor life in Chicago, and had a string of mistresses to keep him company. Nanna never let on, and twice a year welcomed him home as if he were the Second Coming itself. Dead before age 65, a few years apart, they lie in a joint grave that aspirationally proclaims, “Together Forever.” I wonder if he would have chosen that.
While Nanna spent a dozen years as a de facto single mom, Granny was the real thing. Her husband, drafted at age 39, left her and their daughter for London, where he clocked the days till he was sent home on a mysterious medical discharge. They celebrated, as so many couples did after the war, by having another child, my uncle Hank. Six months later, my grandfather was dead, the victim of an equally mysterious train accident. As a 14-year-old, I was mighty curious about the circumstances of his demise, and conned my great-uncle Bill into taking me to the scene of the accident, without my mother’s knowledge. Standing at the edge of a steep hill that cascaded violently toward the LIRR train tracks, quite far from the train station, I suddenly knew that the “accident” had been deliberate, that there was no way my grandfather could have rolled down the hill unless he had been hell-bent on doing so. My grandmother refused to discuss this, which I respected, until her dying days. Then she said casually, when we were alone one morning in her bedroom, “Your grandfather killed himself, you know.” A great tidal wave of relief washed over me, tinged with sadness for her and (I admit) an ugly feeling of vindication.
After Granny died—five days after, in fact—I flipped through a new Vermont Country Store catalogue. It was a store she and I liked, replete with oldfashioned goods, each one a nostalgic link to the past. Normally I enjoyed the catalogue, its shiny baubles and treats beckoning me to buy. I tried to view it as a museum, looking and drooling but not reaching. This time, however, I took no pleasure in it. Grief had sapped joy from me, and I spent days alternating between crying in private and feeling nothing in public.
Suddenly I saw it: a tall bottle of Replique, its amber-colored liquid beckoning to me. I couldn’t believe it! Was it a sign from Granny? She had promised to send me a sign from the Great Beyond, to tell me she was ok. I reached for the phone, and I ordered that bottle.
It couldn’t come fast enough. Impatience was a new feeling, and I thought that maybe this was a good thing after days of feeling nothing but full-on sadness. Maybe the waves of grief were abating like an unwanted low tide. When the package finally arrived, I tore open the box. There, buried down deep, was my bottle of Replique. I sprayed it into the air and sniffed. Yup, that was the scent I remembered, the smell of my beloved grandmother. I held out my left wrist and gave it a spritz. It’s important to wait five minutes, I told myself, for the top note to disappear and the real scent to emerge. I watched the kitchen clock impatiently, and then took a long breath, nose hovering inches from my wet wrist. But I’d forgotten that perfume smells differently on different people, that it marries well or poorly with body chemistry. And this marriage screamed for immediate divorce. I didn’t smell elegant or sophisticated, redolent of Sutton Place or money. I smelled like cheap, cloying cologne. I hurried to the sink and scrubbed off the offending odor.
So, I had no alternative in my attempt to replicate the scent of my grandmothers, but to resort to using lavender. A friend told me that lavender calms people down, so I ordered a bottle from the Vermont Country Store, and sprayed my office with it before tricky meetings. I spied handmade lavender sachets, and stuffed them in my sweater drawers the way my Nanna used to do, to keep out moths. Finally, in a gleeful splurge, I bought an entire box of lavender bath salts and hand lotion. One night, I luxuriated in a hot lavender bath, then slathered on a fistful of lavender lotion. I slipped between the sheets like a damp snake.
“Ah-CHOO!” sneezed my husband. “Ah-ah-CHOO!”
“WHAT are you wearing?” he demanded. “AhCHOO!”
I slunk out of bed, and turned on the shower. Slipping off my nightshirt, I stepped under the spray and angrily soaped off my beautiful lavender. Soon I no longer smelled like my two elegant grandmothers. Instead, I reeked of boring, generic, white soap.
I had to give away my lavender, all of it: my handmade sachets, my squat jar of bath salts, my full bottle of lotion. I even had to stop cooking with Herbes de Provence, as that is full of dried lavender blossoms. My husband is just too allergic.
But every now and then, I step into a store and the intoxicating smell of lavender washes over me. Suddenly I am six again, freshly washed and dried, stirring up great clouds of lavender powder in Granny’s Sutton Place bathroom.