During the High Holidays--the period in between the new year (Rosh Hashona) and the Day of Repentance (Yom Kippur)--it is customary to reflect on larger meanings, and to take stock of overarching hopes and goals. It is also a time to examine relationships, to reflect upon how we relate to others and to consider if we are living up to the potential of our own best self. In this last year, my relationship with grandma Lil has come to be one of my most important connections.
I am starting to write this post in a few quiet moments between getting Jacob off to school on the middle school bus at seven, and the time to get Avi out the door to his eight thirty bus in an hour. I'm sitting in bed with my laptop, and Avi is lying beside me working on his four-by-four Rubik's Cube, with a notebook full of printed instructions off the web. In a funny way, I think Avi picks such hard things to obsess over as a way to train himself to tolerate greater and greater frustration. It is amazing to watch him develop in confidence and self-awareness as he gets older. Yesterday, he spent nearly four hours working on the cube while Marty and I cleaned and fixed out at the Fall City place (everything is out now. One more trip to spackle, paint, and do yard work and she should be ready for her closeup).
In some ways, living with grandma has hints of a similar kind of mothering, but the process goes ever so slowly in reverse as she finally, reluctantly slows, in this last phase of life. Her memory, once robust, has become lacy--hung now on particular words and images so that it takes the right cue for the experience to flood back. Yesterday at dinner, she was very quiet, (as she is more and more, not being able to follow conversations as hearing wanes). Wanting to draw her out a bit, I asked (knowing the answer) "Did you go to Volunteer Park with Nurmi today?" "No..." she replied, her brows knitted in that familiar way that means either she hasn't heard, or she is trying to remember. I tried again. "Did you see the Dahlias?" "Oh yes!," she brightened, "They have such a nice garden there!"
And like a camera zeroing into focus, she was fully there behind her eyes. We talked more about the day and ruefully I showed her the adhesive residue that I hadn't been able to scrub off my hands from fixing the tile in the tub at the Fall City place; she began to talk about her boys and how good they were at fixing things and how she would always wonder to them how they got so good at things, and they would say, "'Mom, dad takes us along to work, and we watch him'--they got so good by watching their dad," she repeats. She tells this familiar story proudly, her eyebrows rising to emphasize the word "watch" and to demonstrate how earnest little-boy-Mike and little-boy-Steve were in explaining it to her. She has told us this story at least twenty times--sometimes almost more to remember it herself, than for our sake, I think.
This story, like so many others, is almost a ritual she repeats to re-embroider the past where it begins to fray. It is a ritual with parts for each of us to play: grandma begins to speak in a certain cadenced way, Marty or I ask the questions, filling in the details if she forgets and prompting for more when she pauses. The boys instinctively stop their conversations, not quite listening (they've heard it before) but not talking either. There is orderliness to this iteration of memory--a way of naming the past to keep it alive, which at the same time both animates and reifies. These stories have a certain predetermined arrangement to them, like the nick knacks on the mantle which must be placed just so.
This particular story--the story of Mike and Steve watching their father work--is one shaded not only with pride but with a sadness that is never spoken. As I listen, I wonder silently what it was like to be a divorced mother doing the weekend-with-dad dance back in the fifties, when so few families did. When I ask her, grandma only shrugs and smiles. That was just life, her shrug seems to say. No use lamenting. (And there's pretty good research that links anxiety and stress to illness and decline, so perhaps that shrug really is the next best thing to immortality.)
But immunity doesn't erase pain. I know from talks with Mike and Steve (long enough ago now that I can't remember which one said what) that for them, underneath that shrug lies both a pride in their father's skills--renovating apartment buildings, fixing and building--and a frustration at his capricious distance--that as boys, and even as young men, they were never trusted to help, but were constrained to only ever watch him work. "When watching is what you can do," papa grins, "you get pretty good at it." Although he tosses off this reflection with grandma's same sanguinity, the memory seems bittersweet. And some memories of Steve senior which Mike has shared are not even tinged with sweetness. What must it have been like for Lil to negotiate that gulf?
You cannot even wonder that perhaps she is so sanguine because she somehow missed it, that somehow through a deliberate turning away, she perhaps sidestepped the anguish of mothering two boys tangled in frustrated longing for a father who didn't know how to father. But no, she knows--she never sugar-coats these iconic retellings. The truth is never idealized into some prettier picture or shunted aside for a more comfortable view. The bones are all there in the open--she seems simply not to be perturbed.
Maybe it's the distance of years that makes her so implacable, but I don't think that is all it is. Lil is the easiest housemate ever--nothing seems to bother her. Her serenity seems simply part of her nature. The only way I have of guessing that a detail might be not quite to her liking is when she has trouble remembering it (hidden in repeated questions that never seem to get satisfactorily answered for her because the answers don't quite make sense: "Why are you cooking a dinner for people who aren't family?" she asked me several times when I was planning to have a group of friends over, or revealed when, on a day I was working at the clinic, she turned away a Hospice aide she didn't like because she didn't remember her).
Sometimes grandma slyly admits that something passed was not quite kosher, but only after the fact, never to the person's face, and with no rancor. She was quite tickled, once, to get a postcard from Stefan saying he thinks of her often and telling a little about the music scene in New Orleans. She read it over several times, laughing. "Those boys used to play music upstairs all night," she hooted, "--they thought I couldn't hear, but oh, I could!" And then, foggy about the time, she becomes the littlest bit self-righteous: "I was still working then--at the bookstore--and I needed my sleep!"
Living with grandma is a balancing act between respecting her indefatigable independence and knowing where to offer enough support. It is the constant challenge of being near enough to lend a hand, but not so near that I sap her resilience--vigilant but not uptight. I notice how it changes me. As when my boys were babies, some inner ear has become attuned to noises I don't even know I hear, so that grandma's faint moans at six a.m. on the morning of the tachycardia incident brought me out of sleep and half way up the stairs before I was consciously aware of any sound.
I really appreciate about grandma too, that she understands her own limits--she remains tenaciously independent where it makes sense (like making her own breakfast and going out to get the paper and the mail each day), and relies on us graciously where she needs to (like letting us do her laundry, conceding at last to Dr. Terhaar's instruction to stop going up and down the basement stairs because of the risk of falling).
But there is a good side as well, to challenging that life-long habit of independence just a little. I think grandma has always been so much the one in charge--the oldest sister, the single mother, the one who cares for others--that it doesn't even occur to her that she might be the one to deserve receiving care. Every evening, when I start dinner, I turn on NPR, pour myself a glass of wine, and take a small glass out to Lil along with cheese and crackers or a some other starter, if we're having one. She seems surprised anew each evening at this small gesture, breaking into such a broad and genuine smile that her eyes brighten with that particular light that is only hers. It's one of the things that makes her such a pleasure to live with.
Last night, as we shared squares of Trader Joe's milk chocolate truffle bar after the rest of the family had scarfed theirs and left the table, she told me, "I just feel so secure living here with you and Marty." It was the first time I can remember her phrasing it that way--'living here with you and Marty' instead of 'having you and Marty living here with me.'
There is a welcomingness in this construction, as if, after this year together, with all of us feeling this arrangement is working out well, she wants us to know this really is our home too. Every time she tells us how glad she is that we are here, it just wells up in me how glad we are to be here as well. "You are doing us just as much of a favor, if not more," I tell her.
This move to Seattle has been so wonderful for our family in so many ways--the boys schools and arts opportunities in the city...being closer to cello lessons, dance classes, our Temple, my school, Marty's school, Marty's work, Vashon family, just everything...raising our boys in a neighborhood that looks like the real world instead of lily white Fall City...and for me, most of all, being back on these achingly familiar streets where I grew up, where I can take my boys to the restaurants and beaches I knew as a kid, where I know my way around by unremembered instinct, and where I can drive on streets that look and feel and smell right. Just walking in Volunteer Park when fall leaves start collecting on the ground brings such a surge of feeling in my chest I blink back tears.
And living here with Lil, for all the unexpected twists and topsy turvey logic of it, is a pleasure (In our funny little half-apartment, I feel back in college in more ways than one). But it's all been worth it, from the effort of downsizing a three-bedroom house into an attic and a basement (and, well, to be honest, also the garage, my father's mother-in-law apartment, and of course, the ever imposed-upon barn on Vashon), to the funkiness of our basement "living room" where our antique red couch and the one wing back chair we've squeezed in face off less than 20" apart, where paintings on the wall compliment the naked pipes and exposed electrical conduit, and where a freezer is featured where one might expect a fireplace or TV, to the storybook retreat of the boys' attic bedroom, where beds cut into the walls feel almost like ship berths or something out of Hogwarts, where Avi sits in grandma's yellow rocker to play the drum set of
I knew Al only when hearing loss had created a muffled darkness of his world not unlike the tiny cave of a workshop he carved out of that underground corner of the basement. I remember him as a gentle man who loved making things for kids--especially for Daniel (I think maybe he was glad to have a boy around among all us grand daughters)--and I remember he once supervised me putting Rohina's first ten speed bike together, never once telling me I was doing it wrong, or offering to take over--just lending me his tools and watching supportively as I doggedly figured my way by trial-and-error, (though I didn't have the first clue what I was doing).
I know Al now mostly through the legacy of the garden and the almost comical traces of his ingenuity and odd sense of design still lingering after all these years. Some--like the decayed plastic sheeting on the side of the basement porch that used to flap noisily on its rusty staples--I've finally liberated (and replaced with a salvage window from the Restore) or like the homemade utility sink (who makes their own sink? amazing!) which with papa's help, we swapped out last winter for a little stainless steel bar sink. And some, like the mismatched custom-made drawers in the shop, or the way Al integrated old car batteries into a rock wall out back, I just grin helplessly and enjoy.
The garden, of course, is utterly unimpeachable. Grandma always counters visitors' praise with her regrets that it does not look so good as it used to. She does not seem aware of how profoundly impressed every person who sees that garden is, not just at the scope and grandeur of it--defiant almost, to sprawl like that in the middle of the city--but that it should be so well designed as to look absolutely beautiful even after two years with only the most minimal of maintenance. About some things, there's just no arguing with her. Though as I sit here with her now at the kitchen table, editing over this piece before I post it, she is commenting on how beautiful it looks, and how funny it is that here, at the end of the summer, new flowers are coming into bloom so that you can hardly tell if it is spring or fall. Perhaps the garden is grandma's one piece of false modesty, and really can we blame her? If it is false modesty, it is well-earned, and it hardly makes a dent in the great deal of pleasure she gets looking out that window every day.
Though grandma may downplay the garden, she proudly tells visitors (like the hospice social worker) that her grand daughter and family live here with her. "I make my own breakfast, but I always eat dinner with the family--someone who's a hundred and one shouldn't be living alone, you know," she explains, seemingly unaware of the irony around how rare it is for someone a hundred and one to still be living in her own home at all, let alone weighing the relative merits of having housemates. Something in me curls warmly when she says "the family," like a cat burrowing into a cushion. We all know we are here to stay now. For as long as she needs us. And, just perhaps, longer--fate and the family willing.
It would make me so glad for this house, with its amazing garden and legacy of central celebrations, to stay in the family. And whether that means us here or someone else, I very much hope that in some way, our family stays rooted in this place where grandma has staked out not only so much of effort and care, but also so much independence, such staunchness of ethical and political conviction, so many gatherings, and so much quiet joy.
So day to day, we live here together, balancing our oddly intimate, yet separate lives. Grandma brushes her hair herself, though now Beza washes it. I wash the clothes and fold them, but she puts them away. She puts the denture plate in, but I guide her fingers to take it out for cleaning. I gather up the bag of incontinence pads from beside the bed, or occasionally from the bathtub stool (where I think she means to only set them for a moment, and then forgets), but she resolutely changes them herself, preferring at least that small screen of privacy. Every morning and evening I give her her meds, but I never need to remind her to take them.
In the space between intimacy and autonomy, we balance.
Every night before bed, I weigh her, glancing up to check that she is not putting a hand out to steady herself against the dresser (which would throw the reading off), and then, if she is ready for bed, we fold up the quilt together and set it aside, replacing the day pillows with the night ones and turning back the sheet. Then I leave so she can change her own clothes for bed--slowly and sometimes stiffly, but still staunchly on her own.
In the space between doing and being done for, we balance.
In the morning, she gets up at six thirty or seven for her traditional breakfast of farina and berries, and then after going back to bed to nap until nine or ten, she makes the bed herself. Sometimes, when I get up in the morning before she does, to roust Jacob up and out for school, I pass by the open door of her room (she closes it at bedtime, but leaves it open if she gets up in the night, long accustomed to patterns of life alone).
In the space between waking and sleeping, we balance.
Often, walking by her door in my morning rush, I am brought up short, for just a fraction of a second's pause, wondering where she might have gone at that hour, with the kitchen and living room clearly empty, before I realize that the unremarkable folds of the old blue-and-white blanket are all the impression her increasingly thin figure now makes in sleep. Where sleep makes babies into angels (no matter how ornery they may be awake), it grants the old a foreshadowing of their own death, laying a facade of frailty on a form stripped of vigor and will by repose.
In the space between life and death, we balance.
To live with grandma Lil is to live daily with the reality of death and be unafraid.
To live with grandma is to understand the decay of the body, the raveling of memory, the ongoing and inevitable loss of siblings, colleagues, friends, and age-mates undaunted.
To live with grandma is to give sadness its due, without ever verging over into depression, isolation, or self-pity.
To live with grandma is to encounter occasional pain squarely but fleetingly, heavy and large when present, but quickly resolved and released, so that when it has passed, it is almost unremembered.
To live with grandma is to witness a posture toward life which is direct, erect, and absolutely certain of meaning.
To live with grandma is to live.
may we all be blessed with a sweet new year
lovely bit of writing...
ReplyDeleteAriel, just beautiful. I'm actually crying! Thank you for allowing me to experience through you this amazing journey.
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