Finding my Grandmother in the Clouds

Or what the Grand Canyon taught me about constantly searching.

The Grand Canyon. Photo: Getty Images

On day three of my cross-country road trip, I steered my Jeep onto the vast stretch of highway that eventually gives way to the Grand Canyon. The sky that day was impossibly, brilliantly blue—save for a massive pile of cumulonimbus clouds that dominated the horizon. They were big, white, and decadently fluffy, a clever disguise for clouds that often foreshadow thunderstorms. Earlier that morning, my friends and I woke up in the neon wasteland of Las Vegas and, four hours later, we were gazing out over one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

Since none of us were expert hikers or adept geologists, we booked a tour guide named Alice for our first time in the Canyon. Alice had long brown hair that was peppered with streaks of gray, and a shy smile that complemented a clear, gentle voice. She told us that she was a truck driver, but work had become scarce when the pandemic hit, so she ended up “getting stuck” right near the Grand Canyon. “This place suits me just fine,” she said, cozy behind the wheel of the Hummer that would serve as our “tour truck.”

Alice took our group on a sunset tour of the South Rim, stopping at different points for us to look out at the view and take pictures. At one stop, she picked needles off of a Ponderosa Pine tree and placed one in each of our hands, then told us to bite into it. I was skeptical, but they actually tasted like oranges. “You put a bunch of these in your water bottle, and you’ve got an excellent source of Vitamin C,” Alice said proudly.

At various points throughout the drive, Alice asked us to pay keen attention to the woods and shout if we saw anything. Sure enough, one of the teenagers on our tour shouted, and Alice hit the brakes. On the side of the road, there was an entire family of elk grazing in the forest. One raised his head as we passed, chomping on hay, looking just like he was saying hello.  

The Grand Canyon, Alice explained, is a spiritual place. If you stop and pay attention, she said, you can see things you would normally miss. “Some of the trees around here are older than all of us—older than our grandparents,” she said, guiding us to a cliff to watch the sunset. There, an Orthodox Jewish couple was swaying back and forth, muttering prayers to themselves as they gazed up at the sky. Dusk had hit the canyon, and its vast, beautiful rocks—which were all shades of terracotta and amber earlier in the day—had now taken on a cast of pale blue and violet. Lightning flickered from the storm clouds in the distance, though Alice assured us their rain was far away enough for us to get home safe and dry.

Part of the intangible magic of the Grand Canyon is its majesty. To stand before it is to witness millions of years of rock formations and erosion—how the Colorado River slowly carved its way through more than a mile of land and, along the way, created one of the most awe-inspiring spectacles in the world. It serves as a sobering realization of how small we are, how short our lives are. But somehow, nestled in that overwhelming feeling of human insignificance, there lies comfort: a reminder that there’s something bigger than us, something massive and more important and unbothered by whatever trivial bullshit we woke up to and decided to be stressed about that day.

There’s a reason spiritual or personal crisis often leads us right back to nature, whether you’re Ralph Waldo Emerson or Cheryl Strayed. It is, as the indigenous people who once populated (and, in some cases, still populate) the Grand Canyon might tell you, the Creator. If you want to meet your maker, all you really have to do is look up at the sky—or, in this case, gaze out at the rocks and wait for some sense of greater meaning.

A postcard from the Grand Canyon. Photo: Getty Images

“Can anybody see the duck?” Alice said, pointing into the distance. One member of our group, a man with his wife and teenage daughter, offered an amazed, “Oh, yeah!” His daughter stood behind him, brows furrowed in adolescent annoyance, as he pointed to a rock in front of us, then traced the duck’s head, beak, and breast with his finger. Her brows widened and, begrudgingly, she let out a laugh. She could see it, too.

I was reminded of one of my aunts, a woman who is constantly on the lookout for signs like these. Auntie Donna is the baby of her family—the last of four children and, she would probably like me to point out, the only natural blonde. She was still young when her father passed away and, therefore, lived alone with her mother (my grandmother) until she got married. It’s true that every child has a unique and particular bond with their parents, but Donna’s was compelling in part because it was formed by grief. She was there when her mother learned how to exist without her husband, the man who built her entire adult life for her—including, and I mean this literally, the house she came to call a home. They were two (and again, I stress this part, natural) blondes living in Revere, Massachusetts, both coming into independence and womanhood in their own ways.

It’s no wonder, then, that Donna seemed to take my grandmother’s passing the hardest of all her siblings. After the funeral, Donna claimed to see signs of my Grandmother from beyond the grave. When she was driving home from the service, the clouds appeared to part, and one formation of fluff in the sky looked an awful lot like a heart. “She’s trying to send me a message,” Donna insisted. “She wants me to be ok!” She took a picture of the heart-shaped cloud and posted it on her Facebook—proving to everyone that the mother she lost was still looking out for her.

In the weeks afterwards, Donna claimed to receive many such heart-shaped messages. There were a lot more heart clouds, and, of course, each one was posted dutifully on Facebook. Then, there was a Nor’easter, and a quick scrape of ice from her windshield revealed another heart, this one made of snow. (Also, posted to Facebook.) A shopping trip to Kohl’s also revealed a heart—by way of two snowy footprints overlapping in the pavement. (Again, another hit on Facebook.) Even a salmon dinner unveiled a heart from Grandma, this time in the form of what appeared to be…a bone fragment. Her Christmas card one year displayed her beautiful family on the front and, on the back, 12 Facebook photos of hearts she’d encountered. Eventually, she decided to get a tattoo of a heart on her wrist, just in case Grandma ever lost the ability to send messages through the sky, the weather conditions, or animal remains.

Some in our family began to see this constant barrage of paranormal hearts as signs of my aunt’s delusion. What started as a reasonable suspension of belief in the wake of a traumatic event had, in their eyes, turned into an obsession. One of my cousins told her so over a family dinner, the first in the months since we had buried our grandmother. He picked up a dirty, crumpled napkin and, in his best Boston accent, said: “Look, it’s a haht!” Despite knowing better, I laughed.

There was a long, uncomfortable pause once the laughter died down. “Am I just a joke to you?” Donna asked, her voice raising menacingly. As a seasoned child of an Italian woman, I knew what was coming: We had crossed the line, and my aunt was going to let us have it. My cousin, all masculine bombast before, now laughed nervously.

Donna’s hands flew into the air before coming down—hard—onto the dinner table. “If my mother died and I want to hope that, in some way, she is still out there, still looking out for me, then what the hell is the problem with that?” she said. The table fell silent. “Am I harming anyone? Is it too much to ask to find ways to comfort myself in my grief?” She picked up the paper napkin in disgust and dabbed at the tears that had begun to fall down her face. Rather than let us see her cry, she got up and went to the bathroom, leaving us to sit in our guilt. When she came back, my cousin apologized, but I still felt awful about the entire exchange.

Just like the people who once looked out at the Grand Canyon and saw ducks or boats or ancient Greek temples, my Auntie Donna was merely looking into the abyss of life left behind by grief and searching for meaning. I used to think she was trying to see my Grandmother where she truly wasn’t, but who was I to say, really? In the wake of her passing, my Grandma is somehow felt constantly—every time one of us cracks an egg into a bowl to begin one of her recipes, on those rare and special occasions when a belly swells with new life, or whenever one of us loses something valuable and mutters a prayer to Saint Christopher, only to find the item against all odds. I still get emotional whenever I think about my grandmother, but my aunt and her slightly wacky hearts helped me to wonder whether I’m feeling sad that she’s gone or merely overwhelmed that I still feel her as if she was right here with me.

The thing about spirituality—or any sort of belief—is that it is special precisely because it defies logic. On the one hand, you could certainly look out at the Grand Canyon and marvel just at the science and history of the land; there doesn’t necessarily have to be some bigger meaning for you to appreciate its majesty. On the other hand, you could be so moved by its colors, its textures, and the way it all makes you feel that you open yourself up to the possibility that there really is something more—something hiding for you to uncover. A lot of times people ask me why I’d choose to study religion, or why I’d choose to believe in general. I think that’s the wrong question. For me, even after years away from prayer and church and scripture, the question I keep coming back to is actually: Why not?

I think this is the question my aunt was getting at with her visions of hearts. Where we saw lunacy, she saw love. And if that wasn’t harming anyone, what was the big deal in letting her believe? Or, maybe, in believing with her, too?

The next morning, I was guiding the car south of the Grand Canyon and well into New Mexico. For nearly four hours, there was nothing but flat green land to look at, so my friend Tyler gazed at the clouds in the sky to pass the time.

“Oh my God! Look! It’s a cat!” they said excitedly, pointing out the driver’s side window.

I slowed down the car to see for myself and squinted, trying to imagine. The sky seemed so vast out here in the middle of the road, almost like we were looking out over an ocean of farmland. I did not, despite my best efforts, see a cat in the clouds, but when I looked back, Tyler was still pointing to the sky, smiling to themselves.

“Do you see it?” they asked.

“Oh yeah,” I responded, smiling back. “Would you look at that?”