The Passage of Time
My grandmother’s passage down the tunnel can’t help but remind me of the passage of time. But death often makes me perceive time in distorted ways. The final, enfeebling stages of illness seem to vanish, as if they never happened. Even though my grandmother and I haven’t spoken or been together in more than a year (ever since she ceased to know who I was), I can now “see” her more vividly than ever. And I hear her strong voice. It’s as if she’s calling to me from a few years back, when her voice truly was strong.
Vero Beach, Florida, 2000
In my mind, she says the same thing again and again: “Yeah!” That’s it. Just, “Yeah!” She lived in the South her whole adult life and picked up a bit of the cadence, so when she says it, that short word becomes something like “Yay-uh.” And the word is so … her. Always positive, always forward-looking. Nothing like me. Nothing like the state I’m in right now, reviewing it all, our nearly forty-year relationship, trying to make sense of the passage of time.
Here are some remnants from close to the beginning:
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I’m the short one.
There we were, ready for the swimsuit competition! My sister and I are at my grandparents’ house in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1972. I must have been four (but … am I wearing a diaper in those photos … at four?!), which means my sister was nearly seven.
Here we are again, this time with my grandparents. Now I’m eight, I think.
Montgomery, Alabama, c. 1977
And then … fast-forward a quarter of a century….
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, January 2002
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似通う (nikayo(u): to resemble closely) to be similar + to frequent a place |
We had gathered in L.A. for my cousin’s wedding. Six years have passed, and that cousin and her husband now have two kids. These days, my sister’s children are older than we were in those early photos.
Everything has changed beyond recognition: relationships, personalities, faces. We’ve scattered to far-flung places and rarely see each other. The family has fractured beyond belief. My grandmother has served for years as the glue, and I wonder how much further apart we’ll all drift in her absence….
Close to Being Close
It’s hard to say whether she and I were ever close. We’ve always lived several thousand miles apart. Throughout my childhood, we had a “birthday” sort of relationship. Every year without fail, she sent a birthday gift, and I wrote a polite thank-you note. And that was pretty much the extent of it. When she called the house, we exchanged a few polite words, though we had nothing much to say to one another. And when I saw her at Thanksgiving or whenever, same kind of deal. Polite.
Her husband, my grandfather, died on my twenty-seventh birthday. Up till then, she had never forgotten “my” day. After his death, she would never again remember it. I didn’t mind. I thought it was interesting to see how the human mind works—how we push away thoughts that are too painful. “My day” had become an unhappy memory for her.
In my adulthood, I suppose we developed a friendship. She said once, “I feel close to you. I don’t know why, but I do feel close.”
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通好 (tsūkō: friendship) to know thoroughly + to like 疎通 (sotsū: mutual understanding) distant + to know thoroughly 内通 (naitsū: secret understanding, collusion) inside + to know thoroughly 共通 (kyōtsū: in common, shared) common + to know thoroughly |
I felt something back … but “close” wasn’t a word I would have chosen. I don’t believe she truly knew me—not in the sense of what goes on in my daily life or in my mind. Did I ever even tell her about studying Japanese? I must have mentioned it once or twice, but she wouldn’t have had a context for it, and I’m not one to tell someone something if they’re unlikely to be receptive. I’m pretty sure all she said in response was, “Oh, my.”
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通じる (tsūjiru: to make oneself understood) |
At the same time, she knew me in the way that only a grandparent can know you. They somehow absorb your very essence by seeing you repeatedly from the very start of your life. And in that way, they know more about you than you can ever know about yourself.
In one of our last conversations, I mentioned that I write about architecture. (I’ve been writing about it for five years, but because of stroke-induced dementia, that was news to her.) She said, “You were always interested in architecture, even when you were a little girl.” I was? I’ve never seen myself that way. This fascination of mine feels fairly recent. I needed to know more, so I pressed her to remember some examples. She couldn’t, but something came back to me anyhow—the way I had asked her to drive me around Montgomery so I could see antebellum houses with two-story columns, the ones I associated with Gone with the Wind. Was that what she was thinking of? She said emphatically, “Yes, that was it!”
As she’s my last grandparent to go, that’s part of what I lose with her death—that access to my own history.
Road Closed, No Thoroughfare …
A Few Final Memories
As her memory failed, my grandmother covered it up quite well. The last time I ever heard her voice was last year, when her sister called and wanted the two of us to talk. I wasn’t home, so they left a message. My grandmother took the phone and said quite strongly and confidently, “Good luck!” Whoever in the world you are, good luck in all that you do! A pretty good thing to say when you don’t know what to say!
And the last day I saw her, in February 2007, my husband and I took her to a movie. Her cognitive skills weren’t too sharp, so we chose the one that would be easiest to understand—the horrible Diane Keaton film Because I Said So. My grandmother hadn’t seen a movie in years, and it made her laugh and laugh, the racy parts most of all. Fifteen minutes after we walked out, she said, “I have no idea what I just saw, but I know I enjoyed myself thoroughly.”
Vero Beach, Florida, December 2002
