“You and I have unfinished business,” the Bride says to Copperhead before an epic knife fight.

I’ve always liked this quote from Tarantino’s Kill Bill. I tucked it in a corner of my head years ago, waiting to make and meet enemies along life’s journey, eventually, and plot a revenge, surely. Except that I still don’t have enemies and I’m not a revengeful kind of person, so I mostly mutter it when I’m trying to kill a mosquito.

Honestly, the only person with whom I have unfinished business is my late mamie.

Rest assured that she did die of old age at 92 last December, it’s not like we had a final epic knife fight at the long-term care facility where she spent the last year of her life.

This is a posthumous duel, and last week, it took me to the city of Niort, where Mamie started her adult life and where her 96-year-old sister still lives.

I was close to my mum’s mother, aka mamie. She lived five minutes from us and I spent hours with her after school and during holidays. I don’t know whether she had been a good mum—the jury is still out on this one—but she was a good mamie and overall a good person.

It took me a while to realize that many, many things didn’t make sense at all in mamie’s life. Not the decision she was making—that would actually make sense, my own decisions don’t always make sense—but her general life story and by extension, my mum and ours.

Mamie was constantly making arrangements with reality, reinterpreting it and twisting it as needed for the smallest, most inconsequential things—and for the biggest ones as well.

And this was decades before dementia could be used as a convenient excuse.

I started asking questions when I was a tween, probably when I realized my own grandparents were kids during World War II. I know papi’s story but that’s another story. I have yet to figure out mamie’s story. Oh, she was always sharing something, but she had another version of the same story a month later.

And everything was like that. She made eggs and tomato for dinner, except she didn’t because you could clearly see leftover minced beef on the plate. Papi had never been sick except, you know, the multiple strokes he had. She didn’t remember being pregnant with my mum (!). She couldn’t explain why she had come to Nantes from her hometown. The list of things no one forgets ever except her is long.

So there are giant question marks hanging over my mum’s entire childhood, the life of mamie’s own parents and hundreds of decisions she made throughout her life. Papi was as evasive as mamie but in another kind of way—most of the time, he didn’t know for real because frankly, mamie was wearing the pants.

The whole “hiding the truth” business could be anecdotal because mamie was also kind, caring and very reliable. But she was also prone to bouts of depression and struggling. She seemed to be on the verge of sharing something meaningful—and probably true—once in a while but she would invariably shake her head and sigh.

Mamie wasn’t a pathological liar in the clinical sense. At one point, I realized she was always lying to hide something—small mistakes, bad decisions, occasional money problems, the fact that she was getting old and no longer able to take care of herself towards the end of her life.

This is why mamie’s many mysteries are interesting. She was lying for a reason—lying for reasons.

It’s time to decipher the reasons, maybe find her secrets or at the very least retrace her life.

I texted my mum’s cousins the day I arrived in France, announcing I wanted to see mamie’s sister. Honestly, I should have visited her earlier—the two sisters were close and I hung out with both of them a lot as a kid and a teen. But mamie’s sister stopped making the trip to Nantes around the time Mark was born and I had a busy decade between baby/toddler Mark, the pandemic, papi passing away and eventually mamie leaving us.

The cousin replied right away to my out-of-the-blue text, and reported mamie’s sister would indeed like to see me.

Then I worked on making my way to Niort, a city a mere 150 km from Nantes but without direct train access. I found a FlixBus to Niort then I booked a BlaBlaCar to carpool in the evening since there was no return bus.

“I’m going to test both French buses and ride-share services!” I told Feng the night before the trip.

The next day, I took the 10 a.m. FlixBus and set up my alarm to wake up just before noon to get off in Niort, or else I would have ended up in Montpellier in the evening.

My mum’s two cousins picked me up and drove straight to the house of mamie’s sister. It couldn’t have been weird to meet up with relatives I hadn’t seen in ten years but we hit it off immediately. We’re no strangers, after all.

Mamie’s sister is doing remarkably well at 96. She’s sharp and funny… but like her sister, she offers many versions of the same story and no, it’s not old age, she’s just like mamie.

I learned a thing or two and saw places I’ve heard about many times. We talked about everything, sometimes about mamie, then I crossed the city to my BlaBlaCar pickup point—do share a ride with perfect strangers, people, it’s fun!

Like I suspected, no secret was blurted out but I did see relatives I care about, so that’s something.

And maybe there’s no big secret, after all. Maybe mamie was just the way she was because… reasons.

Yet I wrote “Chapter 1” in the title because I want to believe there will be a “Chapter 2.” Digging is caring, mamie. She was stubborn. So am I.