You can’t have it all, but
You can have the crinkles of skin around her eyes mirror the joy about her mouth when we first came to visit, and every visit after that.
You can have the bright reflections of chlorine-blue water reflect and refract on her walls in decades-old summer, laughter and pizza-stained mouths rinsed clean in the depths of the pool.
You can have her husband, a dead ringer for the Grandfather Frost of old, step out and joke to you “is the water wet, children?”, and us sing back, “yes, of course!”, eyes and shoulders reddened from liquid, light, and time.
You can have the grief of Frost’s departure from this world, not to return at least by that vessel, and the visits to her home in the coming years, still joyful, but laced with something bitter...
Consuming grapefruit with the skin still on.
You can have her loneliness and sorrow seep out with every visit, in her kisses on your cheek, in the shape and unsteadiness of her feet upon the stained carpets, only to be flooded quickly by good spirits and laughter and gifts again.
You can have the visits to your father’s and Grandfather Frost’s graves, not too far apart in the communal cemetery, grapefruit skin and chopped onions prickling your eyes and mouth as you stand and support her arm,
Her petaled gifts marking memory before stony names.
You can have her voice but not her face speak to you while you work across the world, wording kindly but betraying much of her desperation to join her husband, her ennui with the world and the people in it, you among them—but she would never say so—who have left her behind.
And you can have the shock and denial of the news of her passing, peacefully and in her sleep thank goodness, just hours after life reminded you, by other means and other people, to cherish those you love.
Witness to nearly a century of human folly and grace, you can have an old woman return to whence she came, transfigured from the material to immaterial, and immortalized in the presence of robins and squirrels who fed from her hands once upon a time, peering in now through her glass doors, searching once more for the kindness of crumbled bread and sweet blue eyes.
You can’t have it all, but you can have the love of an old woman.
At least there is this.
Volim te zauvek, Baka Mila.