Truth About Grandma

I meant to write a witty and wise (naturally) rumination on sisterhood, spinsterhood (well, not yet, but give me a few years), and the effects of living abroad on family ties – topics very much on my mind now that my sister has announced she’s marrying a guy whose last name I don’t even know. Because every last one of my sister’s friends is married, I have this vision of myself at the wedding, standing alone on the dance floor, being smacked in the chest with the bouquet like a dodge ball. And I meant to write about how envious I am – not so much that my sister has met someone, but because her husband-to-be will know my grandmother, and with any luck, even have her at the wedding.

The wedding news broke last week – I found out just after I attended the Closing Ceremonies for the Olympics, and was so flummoxed by the news I actually had to call my sister the next day, just to make sure she knew I was happy for her, in case in my shock I hadn’t responded appropriately. (Though she often won’t tell you what they are until after you’ve disappointed her, my sister very definitely has rules for ways certain situations should be handled. I still remember her reprimanding me once years ago for not saying “bless you” when she sneezed.) Then I went straight from the Olympics to Florida to see my grandmother, who’s broken her hip.

Even after each of her heart attacks, I’ve never seen her look so old and afraid. My grandmother has lived through the deaths of her husband and two children, and she’s made dozens of jokes about her own. I’ve never once heard her feel sorry for herself. But breaking a hip was the one thing she always said she didn’t want to happen to her – no one really recovers from that, she’d say. And now she has, and the humor and the dignity were gone last week – she’s afraid, and I’m afraid, too. She’d get so anxious at nights – so unable to breathe – that she slept in the chair next to her bed, because she had to be upright. She has home care, but I slept next to her – or more accurately, dozed occasionally. At least once an hour I’d be wide awake, either from the sound of her agitated breathing, or because I wanted to double check that she was, in fact, breathing.

She cried – something she never does. (Last year I got her to admit that she thought that if she started crying, she feared she would never stop.) I was too busy doing things – cooking her required no-salt meals, fixing her TV after her friend watered both it and the plant on top of it, fetching, organizing – to cry as much as I might have. The sight of someone so strong reduced to tears because she has to go to the bathroom – and doesn’t know if she can make it in time – is so spectacularly awful I’m incapable of describing it at the moment. So, too, is going down to the storage bin to fetch your mother’s wheelchair – my mother’s wheelchair – for her mother to use.

One day I got out a suitcase of letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother while he was away at war – letters my grandmother has been telling me about for a few years now, but visits with her have always been too busy to have a look. I sat on the floor at my grandmother’s feet and read a few aloud. Then I stopped because I didn’t want her to see me cry. I looked up at her and realized she wouldn’t have noticed.

She shook her head and said – sounding sorrier for herself than I’ve ever heard her – “If he ever saw me like this.” I wish I didn’t have to.

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A return to wit -- or attempts at it -- and, yes, an actual link or two soon. I promise.