Growing up 30 miles north of Pittsburgh, spending weekends with my grandparents near the city always felt like a Walt Disney vacation. I memorized our route to the South Hills so firmly that I could be half asleep in the backseat of my parents’ car and sense when we were about to turn off the interstate onto the Carnegie exit. My internal odometer knew that in just a mile we would make one left up Forsythe, another onto Green Tree Road, and then a final right into their driveway.
I was introduced to Pittsburgh through the errands we would run in the Strip District and the red public transit bus we would ride together Downtown. Like most Pittsburgh kids, I challenged my lung capacity by holding my breath through the Fort Pitt Tunnel and ate enough free Eat’n Park smiley cookies to last well into my forties.
My grandparents met on a blind date in the 1950s, my grandfather a dashing young Italian immigrant and my grandmother a practical, Pittsburgh woman of Yugoslavian descent. She claims to have not liked Italians when a mutual friend suggested setting them up, but ultimately relented. They were married in 1961 and lived in a Morningside rowhouse before moving their family of four to Scott Township.
They were married 54 years before my grandmother died of sepsis due to complications from back surgery. I was just four days into my 18th year and freshly accepted to the University of Maryland, five miles outside of Washington, D.C. Over those four years, my grandfather sent me postcards of the Duquesne Incline and we exchanged phone calls religiously every Sunday. One of us would almost always start crying, the sound of the other’s voice opening a well of long-distance heartbreak.
After graduating in December 2019, I spent the pandemic years 300 miles away from him, continuing our weekly phone calls while worrying about his health and exposure risk. Thankfully, he was the first of our family to get his vaccines and was diligent about receiving his boosters from the Giant Eagle pharmacy. Trudging through COVID-inflicted unemployment and a couple of dead-end service jobs, I felt a tug of homesickness so strong that wrestling it strained every muscle in my body. After first calling my parents and declaring I would be moving home, I dialed my grandfather’s landline: “Oh, Madonna!” he said. “I am so happy!”
Visiting, then withering
After living in my childhood bedroom for eight months, I moved into a North Side studio 12 minutes from him, just over the West End Bridge. We still exchanged our weekly phone calls, but they would usually be accompanied by lunch or coffee plans. He would often be finishing a cigar in his carport when I pulled in the driveway, and we would talk until the amber ashtray was full. In the nine years that his house was half empty and his ring finger bare, he would leave three times a day just to escape the loneliness of widowhood. Although my one-person studio reflected my hyperindependence, he saw a connection between our lifestyles that I hadn’t before considered. “You understand it, Bella,” he said before exhaling vanilla smoke into the air. “What it’s like to live alone.”
What I didn’t know then was that these would be the last two years of his life. That magnetic pull I felt before was my intuition: a taut, invisible thread between him and me. He was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in November 2023, a rare and advanced variant of the disease. Chemotherapy was an option, but not recommended for an 88-year-old man. I watched in horror as someone with a once-hefty appetite slowly withered; a man so independent now reliant on strange nurses to bathe him.
I woke up in bed next to my sister when my mom called with the news of his passing that May. We had visited him in his hospice facility just three days prior, when he barely had the strength to lift a fork to his mouth. Being his only grandchildren, we inherited all his personal belongings. I was sentimental about everything, from his shaving kit to his favorite winter coat; I could have dismantled the house brick by brick and packed it in a trunk. The only solution I could think of was to buy a house of my own to store it all.
I have childhood memories of following my grandfather into his garage, a mystical room full of sharp objects that was otherwise off-limits to me. As quiet as a shadow I would stand underneath the fluorescent buzz, eyeing an autographed photo of Frank Sinatra hung high on the concrete wall and the tall, wooden shelves stacked with antique gadgets that surrounded his Nissan. I come from a long lineage of stubborn handymen who amass vast tool collections in lieu of hiring repairmen. All the men in my family are the resident contractors of their households; self-taught electricians, plumbers and woodworkers.
Naturally this influenced the kind of project property I wanted in my first home, a structure I could take pride in transforming myself. This would come to mean a 1920s brick beauty in need of a new roof, full kitchen demolition, refinished hardwood floors and coats of fresh paint. I stood in my grandfather’s garage after he passed, breathing in the cold must and realizing that he left me my own personal Home Depot. Rummaging through buckets, shelves and drawers gathering all that I might need, I noticed for the first time that his four-lettered name — Elio — was carved into every plastic handle.
Within 24 hours of collecting the keys, I started ripping up 400 pounds of blue and pink carpet. Hacking at the disintegrating threads with my grandfather’s Stanley boxcutter, I cut large rectangles of dusty fabric and rolled them into the corners of every room, exposing the antique oak flooring underneath. My blade dulled quickly and just when I worried I would be forced to give up for the day, I thought to unscrew the handle. Tucked inside was a stack of fresh blades, perfectly uniform, and I laughed remembering how my grandfather would similarly fill his mechanical pencils with a capsule’s worth of lead.
The house echoed now without insulation underfoot and its original character came out of hiding. The kitchen’s drywall was secured with glue instead of screws, and when I tore down all the panels, I uncovered a window above the back door and a built-in ironing-board-turned-spice rack. Underneath three layers of linoleum tile was the original Douglas fir flooring, and I spent weeks scraping away tar paper with fabric softener and a putty knife. With all of these features revealed again, the kitchen reclaimed its Prohibition era feel, the whole house sighing with relief.
I’ve been asked throughout the renovation process when exactly my house started to feel like a home. The short answer is that I felt at home the second I walked through the door. The long answer is that ancestrally speaking, I’ve been at home in this city two generations before I was born. I feel at home on every sidewalk, crosswalk and neighborhood because they make up the same city my grandparents loved. Adorning my home with their treasure is the closest I can get to feeling near them again; filling my house with memories of love and those of loss, the most beautiful intersection of grief.
Jordan Stovka is a creative nonfiction writer inspired by nostalgia, ancestry and grief. You can read her newsletter More Than A Feeling on Substack or find her on Instagram.
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