This is a piece I wrote almost two years ago in honor of my grandmother, Nora, who passed away in January 2008. My maternal grandmother recently passed away, too, in March, but I have yet to write her something. I will when I have the time and space to process her death. For now, this one's for all the mothers on Mother's Day (sorry folks, it's a long one):
My grandma Nora had a plaque hanging in the guest bedroom of her house, which said, “I love my friend and the reason why is he is he and I am I.” Sweaty summer nights I’d lie awake in the back of Nora’s Davis home, sheets kicked off, staring at those words. They marched across my eyes like sheep over a fence as my breathing slowed and my body slackened with sleep. Those summers in Davis, Nora played games like memory and Candyland out of her living room game cupboard with me and my sisters. Hunched over the wheel of her extra-long Ford Taurus wagon (space for my grandpa’s wheelchair in the back), she drove us to the Avid Reader, a local bookstore, to pick up shiny, crisp picture books and chapter books, and she bought us back-to-school outfits at Gottschalks in the Woodland mall. When we departed for the sticky, cramped car ride home to Oregon, Nora packed us gummi worms in plastic sandwich bags as a treat for the road.
In second grade, I interviewed Nora about her parents’ immigration and wrote a report for school. Nora’s mother and father met in Poland, in a region occupied by the Russian czar at the time. Her father and his brothers printed subversive literature criticizing the czar, which her mother distributed on the streets. Nora’s mother was captured and thrown in prison one day while passing out pamphlets, and her father fled the country. Eventually, her mother escaped jail and joined her father in Austria, then together they moved to the United States. In the US, her father continued to work as a printer at the Yiddish language Jewish Daily Forward. They held steadfast to their socialist views, and my grandmother gave speeches on street corners in support of labor unions and workers’ rights. This report earned me a privileged visit to the principal’s office, where I read it aloud to her face-to-face. Proudly, I mailed a copy to Nora. When my dad and his siblings scoured her home years later in preparation to sell it, they discovered this paper tucked neatly away, saved for years and annotated with her comments and corrections.
The last time I saw Nora, it was Thanksgiving—an annual family reunion feast at my uncle’s home in Palo Alto. Nora is the matriarch of the family, seated in a throne-like position, wheelchair pushed handily to the side, at the sunny dining room table, rather than at one of the myriad lesser tables nonetheless lavishly set with silver and cloth napkins scattered throughout my uncle’s generous home. My aunt will fetch her a selection of the Thanksgiving dishes.
Nora’s knees bow in and knock together, feet splayed awkwardly shuffling when she walks. The effects of her childhood polio have returned to her in old age. Nora’s a good head shorter than me, now; her back has doubled over on itself and the vertebrae have collapsed together with osteoporosis. No need to rise or walk, though. We all come to her. Indeed, at her memorial, the head of her assisted living home remarked that Nora had more visitors and telephone calls than any other resident.
Anyhow, at Thanksgiving, I somehow scoot in between all the aunts, uncles, cousins, and great grandkids to secure a seat by Nora’s side. The conversation does not flag with her at the table, as it would with my mom’s parents, who require an ongoing enunciated, higher decibel translation of all utterances. No, Nora always wears her hearing aid. She doesn’t miss a thing.
“So, Annie,” she gets right to the point, “I hear you just broke up with Andres last week? What happened?”
I don’t feel intruded upon by my grandmother’s directness. Really, small talk bores and frustrates me. Nora knows what she wants to say and what she needs people to hear. She tells me softly, kindly yet forcefully, “You know, I could see you weren’t well matched when the two of you came and visited me back in September. You were really the leader, while he hung back a bit.”
…………….
I remember a conversation from that visit back in September, when Nora, Andres and I went to eat at Baker’s Square:
“Did you hear your cousin Isaac is going to bring his girlfriend to Thanksgiving this year?” Nora asks.
I gossip, “Well, last year, he told me, ‘I’ve been dating this girl for six months and there’s no way in hell I’d bring her to meet the family.’ I wonder what’s changed…is this a new girlfriend?”
“Well, in all those years, you never brought Patrick to Thanksgiving,”
I clamp down my urge to tell her that that doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Patrick, my boyfriend for four years, came to plenty of other family events. Why am I drawn to defend him now, with Andres, who performs so reliably well for family, sitting right across from me? I’m like a kid caught chomping on a wad of chewing gum. I want to blow it into a huge bubble and let it splatter gloriously all over my cheeks, but instead I swallow the thought down with a determined gulp.
Nora forges blithely onward, though: “So, what’s Patrick doing these days, anyway?”
“I dunno, same thing, I guess. Work, school—you know.” What’s Andres thinking right now? He’s inscrutable, but I bet he’s squirming on the inside. This thrills me a little—when will he crack and what will it look like?
“I never cared for him too much, but he was okay, I guess.” Nora trails off.
Gosh, Nora, I think, tell me how you really feel!
Should I trust this judgment of hers? Sometimes, she’s right on the mark, but how well did she really know me and Pat together? We were so immature; she hasn’t gotten to see his growth like she’s seen mine. When Nora died, Pat was the first person I called. And he understood me and my relationship to Nora so much better than Andres did. I wish she had known him better, so she could understand him.
“How’s your hamburger, Andres?” I ask feebly.
…………
Ignoring the aromatic Thanksgiving platter my aunt places before her, Nora continues, “Annie, you’re very strong, and you attract these men who are inspired by you, because of your strength. You’re powerful and you motivate them. But, you need someone who can balance you and support you, too.”
Damn! I feel like she’s hit the nail on the head, looked through my eyes into all those memory shards of frustrated relationship vignettes and pieced them together, giving me a solved jigsaw puzzle, a beacon of light, some picture of what I really want and need, which I can now work towards. I wish this moment would hang in the air for a while longer with some mood music—maybe piano—to highlight its significance. Instead, the chatter of relatives catching up envelopes it. But, I hold onto it, like a charm in my palm to rub over till its worn smooth. The last thing I remember her telling me. Nora has got five children and as many in-laws, 12 grandchildren, 3 step-grandchildren, and I-don’t-know-how-many great-grandchildren, yet somehow she knows me and knows how to make me feel special.
Now, I can’t even recall how I answered her—it must have been something simply along the lines of, “You know what, you’re right!” or “Thank you.” Maybe someone else drew her attention away before I could respond.
…………
Two months prior to Thanksgiving, before I moved out of the stifling studio apartment I shared with Andres and our little tabbie/tortoiseshell kitten, Mocha; before I realized I went to the gym after work not primarily for exercise, but to avoid going home, I dragged Andres into the car to make that hectic grind of tires and metal glinting sun down I-80 from Oakland to Davis. I’d never visited Nora before in her new assisted living home, just down the street from my aunt’s house in Davis.
We rang the doorbell at “My Parent’s House”, Nora’s new home, and a college-age girl in jeans showed us into Nora’s spartan single room—wood floor and a twin bed. Nora looked up from her hulking desktop computer to greet me with a fuzzy kiss on the cheek. She was all dressed in old-lady slacks and a quilted blouse to go out.
I had assumed Andres and I would get some take-out for lunch, which we’d have for a picnic in Nora’s room. She wanted an outing though, and she suggested lunch at Baker’s Square, which I guess is sort of like Denny’s for the elderly. She rang a tinkling bell sitting on her desk for one of the young attendants to come show me how to load her in and out of her wheelchair and the car.
I was worried. What if Nora had to go to the bathroom while we were out? Would she feel comfortable letting me help her? Would I feel comfortable helping her? Would she feel awkward or lose some dignity or pride by allowing me to lift her out of her wheelchair and maneuver her into the car?
Nora was fine, though, of course. Dignity is something you choose to have, and carry inside. You let yourself lose it. Once, when she still lived alone at home, Nora fell in the shower. She was half-dressed, naked from the bottom down, and managed to drag herself across the entire house to telephone the neighbor, who came over with his “big, strong boys” (her words) to lift her and call an ambulance. She chose not to be embarrassed by the experience.
My reluctance or hesitation to care for my grandma—was I afraid?—played itself out in my dreams. What was I willing to do for her? Is it wrong for a family to put an elder in a nursing home or assisted living? Grandparents care for their families for so long; shouldn’t we take care of them, too?
I dreamt that Nora was ready to die. In life, she was always a great supporter of “death with dignity” and the “right to die.” She had commented before that she’d been saving up her pills in case she ever needed them. The bookshelves of her study waved winking spring-like post-its—flags marking the books she had urged family members to claim. (In her honor, after she died, I took A History of the Russian Revolution, The Speeches of Eugene Debs, Lenin’s writings, and the biography of Trotsky. I will probably never read them, but I like to feel their presence.)
In my dream, Nora had summoned me to help her die. I brought her home to an old apartment. Gathered the final cocktail of assorted white pills. A glass of tepid, metallic tap water and an accordion straw. I gently lifted her blouse over her steely curled hair. Nora’s skin was so soft and pale, folded over and over in sags down her chest. So downy and squishy and crinkly like tissue paper. The vulnerability and experience in it. This is a dream, though; it’s so surreal, unreal and clichéd all at once. I dressed her in a pink princess party dress with taffeta and netting ruffles—the kind of thing I might have worn for my fifth birthday party or to dance class. I folded back the cushiony bedcovers—sheets and quilt. It feels so cool and inviting—I could almost crawl in, away from the monotony of calendars and telephones and swiveling desk chairs, myself. Tenderly, I tuck my grandma in her celebratory dress into bed and say “good night, good bye.” I smooth the covers over her with a caress, tiptoeing out the room like a parent sending a child off to dreamland. Would I really be capable of this adult task in real life? Am I strong enough?
In my battered Honda Civic on the drive over to Baker’s Square, Nora details a long, involved drama/love story between Miriam, a Muslim Palestinian girl who works at her home, and the house director’s adopted Egyptian son. “Is Miriam one of your caretakers?” I inquire. “Yes, but she’s really my friend.” Would Nora consider me a friend, too? She surely could not narrate so exhaustively the minutiae of my love life. For a moment, I’m jealous of Miriam.
Arriving at Baker’s Square, I cautiously inch into the disabled spot and gingerly muscle Nora from car to wheelchair to restaurant table. Seated around Baker’s Square in the beige, plastic booths are more senior citizens than I’ve seen in a while. They’re smacking over their bland tuna melts and meatloaf. Flies hover in circles around Nora’s head, occasionally landing on her like they would a horse or cow, crawling at wet eyes and musty ears. Sometimes she brushes at them, but mostly she does not notice. I have a horrible morbid thought that they can smell death on her, but I guiltily push it away. My revulsion is fearful, and feels evil. Who knows, maybe I’m an oblivious harborer of flies, too. At that time, I certainly harbored in willful oblivion plenty of other persistent dissatisfactions with my job and relationship, which I worked hard to keep at bay.
…………..
During a cold snap in January, there was a two-day power outage in Davis. Nora developed bronchitis and one of her lungs collapsed. She was in the hospital for a couple days, and her body was weakened and old, and she was ready to go.
As soon as my dad emailed to me that she was in the hospital, I understood, with this firm knowledge—more than intuition; more like an acceptance of what already is, that this was it. Nora was 88 years old and she had lived a very full life. She accomplished so much and she had given life and care to so many. Nora had cared for my grandfather throughout his 20 year illness, until he died about 11 years before. And she didn't want her life prolonged like that. She was practical and accepting of death. She faced it unafraid. She made great efforts to get all her affairs and will in order for her family. She felt her life complete, and she was prepared for the next step.
Nora took a turn for the worse on a Friday afternoon, and my parents and sister drove out to go see her at the Kaiser hospital in Sacramento. All afternoon and evening, she had been nonresponsive, and when my dad got there, she was still taking heaving, labored breaths, eyes closed, on 100% oxygen and a morphine drip. My dad took her hand and talked to her for a couple minutes, told her he was there. For the first time in several hours, she opened her eyes and made clear contact with my dad, almost lifting her head off the pillow to see him. Then she just shut her eyes again, relaxed and stopped struggling. A moment later, her machine started beeping a rapid alarm, and it was all over only five minutes after my parents had arrived at the hospital. That was her final gift to my dad, to wait until he arrived.
On a heavy, misty day in January, I bombed solo down I-80 for Nora’s memorial at Davis Parent Nursery School, a cooperative she founded back in the 1950s with a few other teachers and parents. The sky was grey and the vast verdant lawn of the schoolyard was littered with tricycles and sandcastle tools. The sight of the miniature toilets inside the bathroom triggered my memory of visiting this sanctuary of Nora’s before. My grey, balding uncle, who’s a slightly smaller, more serious version of my dad, somehow quavers determinedly through a complete read aloud of the Mary Oliver poem Nora had selected for her memorial. The ending persistently hums, inscribed within me… “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is/ I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down/ into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,/ how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,/ which is what I have been doing all day./ Tell me, what else should I have done?/ Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?/ Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?”
There’s an open mic, and many of the parents of Nora’s former nursery school students speak, recalling her wisdom, kindness, generosity, open heart and open mind. Their children, who were toddlers when they knew Nora, are now middle aged. Most of my cousins and I don’t say anything. We have too much to say. I want to say… Nora had a weakness for chocolate. She played classical music on the radio while she cooked, but she also enjoyed my Bob Marley. She sent away for every dinky mail-order trinket offered her, and sometimes gave them to me as gifts later. When I was little, I’d wake up early in the morning to do chair aerobics with her, seated in front of the TV with little knobs and dials in the dark, leathery den. A former nursery school student of hers made it into the NFL, and she watched all his games. In fact, every time I came to visit, she bored me with her proud stories about what her former students were now doing. She was inquisitive and read voraciously; I loved to discuss novels with her. She was very active politically, and steadfast in her views and principles without ever being pushy or preachy. She earned her MSW from UC Berkeley back in the 1940s, when she already had a child. The City of Davis is filled with her students and friends. Indeed, she made friends everywhere. Nora also found time to mother five children, and traveled with my grandfather, a UCD professor. She kept a candy jar in her living room. She funded my college education. She never disengaged from current events and her community. She was a teacher, and her life was filled with love. Nora showed me the kind of person I want to be.
We stopped off to say goodbye to Nora’s home, too, after the memorial. With housing prices going down the drain, we planned to put it on the market ASAP. While everyone else slumped in the living room, I browsed Nora’s bookshelves aimlessly, neck tilted in a crick to decipher the titles, till catching sight of a yellowing, tattered copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran—identical to the brand new volume she had given me upon my high school graduation. Intrigued, I flipped open the cover and read the inscription. It was a gift from her cousin, also named Nora, upon my grandmother’s college graduation in 1942. I felt a sublime little chill trickle down my spine and the hairs on my arms stood up.
I heard the words of Mary Oliver’s poem echoing in Nora’s voice, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I know I must actively choose and forge my life to live it fully, consciously, mindfully, like Nora did. Life is both too short and too long to just float through. I felt all bruised and worn down after this break up, but still hopeful about love. I don’t know exactly how to pray, but I do know how to love. Kahlil Gibran writes of love and relationships: “Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone…Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” I want to find that balance, that give and take, which characterizes two individuals coming together in love. Now, Nora’s gone. And I’m here, piecing together her teachings still. This philosophy expressed in The Prophet, which Nora gave me as I transitioned into adulthood, picks me up, cycling round and depositing me back to my childhood insomniac nights in her house, where like a mantra, I read essentially the same truism in the plaque on her wall, “I love my friend and the reason why is he is he and I am I.”
