Iâm about to go purchase dye for my grandmaâs hair. Light auburn. She was very particular. She never trimmed her nails, not in her whole life. Instead she would file them. At the Jewish home, this raised eyebrows. The on-site âbeauticianâ held her hand and clipped her nails one at a time, andâI wasnât thereâbut I imagined her staring off in reluctant allowance. She was very particular. Maybe she hoarded but to grow up a Jewish woman in America the 1920s, who could blame her. To be witness to mass death and to return to the source of mass deathâGermanyâto raise her boys was not to hoard, but to see the harsh reality in numbers. So she saved her money, she hoarded everything. I found an unopened tin of coffee from the 80s in Switzerland recently. So she hoarded until her life was enormous.Â
When I was a girl, Marion would take me swimming â weâd wash in the shower, my little form between her legs. I felt honored to behold the horror of seeing an elderly body naked. There was a miracle in that disturbance, a familial stream of water connecting three generations of lineage, a lineage that, for most of modern history, never wanted us alive at all. The context into which I first became alive was the context of astonishment that my life was even possible. The Holocaust seemed to be the first thing I ever knew. I canât say this for sureâbut it was there on our lips like the color red. She loved water.
I open a tab just now to read an essay in Guernica by Lidia Yukanovich. Iâm alarmed by the synchronicity of elements in grief: water, water, water. Yukanovich opens the essay by speaking of a water spirit named Laume:
Laume came from transcendental waters, and her spirit lives in all waters, even in baths and showers, in rivers, streams, oceans, the rain, and in toilets. ⊠ Above all she values sincerity, and next industriousness on the part of mothers, particularly the womenâs work of weaving.
About seven years ago, my grandma was the model of industriousness in old age. She had been a college professor of anatomy and physiology at a local community college and continued to cut out clippings from Scientific America for conversational points. She worked hard. She appreciated hard-working minds, especially where hard science was concerned. But she adored the arts too. Sheâd travel the worldâsometimes with whatever random man she was dating, but mostlyâafter her husband died when I was bornâby herself. She collected jewels, art, and furnitureâI am wearing a ring of hers now, polished orange berylâ, and often I suspected this was not for any current or future value but for what these items represented. How they could so neatly embody an impulse to move, to trek farther, to withstand a loneliness so resolutely that loneliness could never calcify and soften the rest of her. It wasnât that she hoarded, she resisted that neo pejorativeâshe longed for the necessity in her objects, that they might transform the parts of her solo life into a gathering of parts, evidence of having lived and lived extraordinarily well. She swam every day 20 laps at least, and she was proud. I think she saw her independence as a triumph but also as a practicality. Still, I think mostly of her loneliness. All her beautiful dresses. The mastery with which she ensnared people into long conversations about her life at parties. The womenâs work of weaving.
She was changing a lightbulb in her new orange condo. Everything about my grandma was orange in a way. Orange hair, orange dĂ©cor, orange sunglasses, orange orange orange. The hair dye I should buy is orange. The word itself is a tautology; it is the only color we can eat, the only time language sweetens into a ball of fruit. And the word was one carried from so many cultures before it finally settled in Europe to replace the French word pomme dâorenge. It neednât an apple to be itself. There is something there too for the woman who grew up in a world where her only course toward power should have been to change her name and assume the identity of a mister. Instead, she traveled to become herself. Of course, she got degrees and raised children and taught and volunteered and lost her husband and continued on, but this all led to an unnecessary word falling away from her. So she climbed the ladder 20 feet up to change a lightbulb in her new orange condo and she slipped and dragged her broken body across shattered glass to the phone. She called my dad and not the ambulance. She didnât want that. She never wanted to need help. But the years after this, she did need help. She would fall. She needed help. She would fall again. She tossed back the pills she was given when she would have known exactly what they were and what they did to the body and why she shouldnât take them. An aid trimmed her nails and sheâd let them. Her life became smaller. Her things were thrown away. Her life became even smaller.
Why do these stories matter? They donât, to be sure. Everyone loses grandparents. Of course they do. I have attempted, as a matter of fact, to reconcile my grief with this conditional. My grief feels self-serving and embarrassing. But now I am looking at her things and I donât know where they belong, whom she was with when she spotted something she could speak about with others. To share a story and evade that fibrous tuft that moves so slowly underneath years and years of solitude. I remember the way she would hold my hands inside hers to wash my hands. I remember how she looked at a drawing of mine of a table and told me it was remarkable, that she wished my grandpaâa child psychologistâwas still alive to see it so they could share in how special it was that I could recognize perspective at such a young age, that I could depict the third and fourth legs of the table drawn smaller at an angle. I thought it was so stupid that she would remark on this, because I was not special, and I was not smart. Later I would look at other drawings and sense that she would be proud yet again. I have never felt smart. I never feel smart. That I can share lineage with her and be able to hold onto the stories I do know, it is easier to see that the legs of a table are there for me to draw. I just wish I could show her how many ways Iâve learned to draw the hidden parts that keep our objects there. I wish she could see how good Iâve gotten.
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