Words’ End

Last week, on the autumn equinox, was our first-first wedding anniversary. (We got married in the fall, and again on the spring equinox of this year.) We went camping, journeyed through the woods, gathered large sticks and cooked hobo stew wrapped in aluminum foil, drank prosecco out of the bottle and watched the fire crackle its way through the dark dark evening. Everything was alive, down to the myriad of spiders everywhere. I stayed away from the spiders and clung to my love, thankful and still amazed at the fortune of meeting him.

Today is my grandmother’s 90th birthday. Was, technically, as she was born in Baku (but is Jewish, not Azerbaijani) and it’s well past midnight there. I talked with her on the phone, and am pretty sure she didn’t really know who I was. She’s in that stage of Alzheimer’s where she sounds both lucid and calm, but that’s because she’s gotten used to the denial of going with the flow of whatever we say. Something to the effect of, You’re my granddaughter? Oh, that’s nice, dear. How nice of you to call.

Talking to her these days is creepy and sad. There’s no point in talking often: I’m a bad granddaughter, haven’t felt particularly close to her since my early teens and was terrible at writing letters from America when she was still living in Kishinev with my grandfather. He passed away in 1997, and she moved here in… 2000? 1999? something like that.

But they did help raise me, and I have many memories of their apartment with its dusty books and knick-knacks and tiny well-loved kitchen and grape vines overgrowing the windows and pigeons nesting in the vines. My grandmother read many newspapers and cooked tasty cheese wafers.

She had stunning black hair and a great sense of style. She flirted with my grandfather by leaning out the window, so that her shoulder-length mane would fall to the side like Rapunzel’s.

She waited for her husband to come back from world war 2 while caring for their three children with one other woman’s help. She watched one of her two sons slowly waste away when he, a chemist, was stricken by chemical poisoning and his workplace didn’t even acknowledge that this was possible, and didn’t support him at all.

She taught, first in schools (history) and then at the university (history of the Party). Her long-ago university students came to visit her up until she left the country. She played bridge with grampa and her friends. She would sit there and watch me eat, smiling with delight. She didn’t really drink, but smoked a pack a day until, I think, grampa died and she moved out of their place to a friend of the family’s, waiting for her emigration documents. They’d lived in that apartment since 1953.

She’s had a dignified, full life. Every once in a while the blind injustice of her chronic brain disease washes over me in a wave of dread.

Isn’t she beautiful?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 at 10:16 pm and is filed under family, health, taking it personally. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.