My poor mother. She’s done this, alone, while working full-time and drastically undersleeping, for months.
I hold on to my own mental faculties as I watch my grandmother’s degrade.
Yesterday Mom lent me a book about Chernivtsi, the little Jewish village in the Ukraine where my father grew up. There’s a lot written in it about the Zafrin family, and about him too; I haven’t read much of it yet, but it got me thinking about history and continuity and family. Because, obvoiusly, I haven’t been thinking enough about family here in California, this world that seems so separate from the one in which I usually live and work.
It does not matter what you are doing now. No matter how physically and intellectually active you are, there is a chance that you’ll need taking care of too. I know most of us are dimly aware of this; but it needs to be viscerally felt at least once.
She used to be a teacher in secondary school, and then for years a history professor in university. Her ex-pupils visited her, I think, up until she left Moldova. My childhood’s most vivid image of her is bespectacled, reading the newspaper by the living room table. Or doing crosswords, she loved crosswords.
We played Battleship on paper. She loved cooking, loved it. Spent her life in the kitchen – when she wasn’t reading the paper or watching the evening news. Or reading literature; although my grandfather read more literature than she did, or perhaps I’m misremembering. Anyway, cooking. Yellow string beans fried up (“sautéed” doesn’t quite suit her kitchen) in butter. Perfectly clear beautiful broth. Open-face melty-cheese sandwiches made in the Miracle Oven as a special treat some suppers. Cheese wafers, we got to make them in her ultra-cool wafer maker that nobody else had. Tea, with lemon and jam, in the evenings. While watching the evening news.
She’d make compotes out of plums and rosehips and cherries. Do you call them compotes in English? Simmer the fruit with some sugar for a bit, then cool and refrigerate. Tasty summer drink.
She smoked a pack a day, out on the balcony when it was warm, on the stair landing when it wasn’t. She hasn’t smoked for something like seven years now, which really isn’t a lot, considering she’s 87. For whatever reason, I always tolerated her smoking more easily than I did my father’s.
She used to be nice and plump, when she got on in years: she’d never been particularly slim. You should see her portrait, gorgeous beret-ed eighteen-year-old with black black eyebrows and round face looking straight at the camera.
