by Liza Ruggiero

 

I had this strange, untraceable feeling – it had been a raw, rainy 49-degree day, after all – that I needed to get an ice cream cone. Not a pint picked up at the store but a cone, cold, indulgent, requiring a drive in the dark after putting the kids to bed. I was thinking about my grandma, to whom I attribute last summer’s obsession with black raspberry chip, so I checked the photos on my phone, and sure enough this time last year I was home visiting her. 

I’ve been thinking about the moms at the playground taking pictures of their children. How easy it is to judge. But I have my own slew of photos on my phone, including one of my daughter as a baby, perched on my grandma’s lap. By then, dementia had made a home of her mind  – a tide whose beating softened clear, brilliant green glass, the kind that glints in the noon sun, to soft, dusky edges – but her body seemed to remember how to accommodate the weight of a small child, and her hands, how to hold.

Lately, when I attempt to capture my children, I’ve noticed that first there is an urge – both desperate and pure – for someone else to witness them. My memory has a strong bias towards remembering the emotional tenor of my life, at the cost of actual specific details, as if I’ve dipped into a pallet of watercolors to create a sweeping sunset, but lack the fine brushes for the acrylic beach scene. This never really bothered me until I had children and was overcome with the desire to consume every last detail of them. 

The other day, I texted my mom, now a grandma herself, a quote from my daughter describing her friend: “Inside myself, I feel that she is very pretty, and, I want to keep her.” I want to keep her. I recognized, in this perfectly profound expression of her love, the longing to make a person permanent. 

There’s a reason, I think, that I could eat you up! is a phrase we utter to children. Perhaps it’s the exact inability to preserve them, like the summer’s sweetest strawberry. Perhaps it’s the fantasy itself, that we’ll be able to coax the jar open on a particularly grim midwinter morning and be transported back to sun-warmed berries plucked by fat, sticky fingers. Or maybe it’s the inkling of premature loss lingering in the back of our psyche as parents, always simultaneously loving their unfolding as we grieve their growing. 

There is much to be said about our lonely American lives, what it erodes within us. But what I didn’t initially understand before becoming a parent was the deep exhale of sharing in the task of witnessing my daughter, of noticing her, remembering her, weaving the fibers of the quilt of her life – the childhood stories we’ll tell, the qualities we’ve observed in her since she entered the world, the funny and precocious combinations of words she triumphantly authored – the blanket she’ll take with her into adulthood, cozy and complicated. 

When my grandma was dying, we dutifully descended upon the nursing home, all of us with our various stories and baggage, literal and figurative, arriving on her doorstep one by one as if out of a movie. My mom had been there, for years it seemed, then: her sister, carrying fresh-picked and grief-laden daisies from her garden. Next, my grandma’s sister, glassy-eyed and heartbroken, hunched over with the weight of losing her big sister, the one who had known her the longest. Then her daughter, witty and brittle, thinner than I remembered her, red converse looking out of place in the aggressively beige space. Against the wall stood my grandma’s great niece, apologetic as she hugged me, almost a stranger now.

If my second-cousin’s shoes looked a little too jolly, then I’m not sure what my 2.5-year-old – with her bouncing curls and bubblegum pink pjs – must have looked like when she bounded out of the elevator. Once she walked onto the unit her steps slowed perceptibly. She glanced up at me tentatively, but resumed her usual verve upon seeing my mom. Later, she’d climb onto my lap as I held my grandma’s hand. That’s the great baba, I’d say, she’s sleeping. She’d smile conspiratorially, as if we were all playing some cosmic game of make believe. Do you want to hold her hand? I’d ask. She’d nod, stroking the still-soft, velvety, sun-spotted hands that had patted each of our backs knowingly during life’s travesties. Hard. This is hard, honey, she would have said.

Eventually my little sister would come, sidling up next to me, overwhelmed and unsure. Soon my big sister would be there too, confident and comfortable, assuming the eldest sister role required during a life event like death. At home that evening, she’d heat up a brothy soup she made for my mom. 

Other visitors came, ultimately, and I slipped out to my car, where my other daughter had awoken. My dad, the dutiful sitter, now had her propped up in his lap. She was so new, then. He hinged the door open when he saw us coming, and my older daughter hopped up to him in her pink rain boots, carefree and happy, intensely alive.

I told my dad about the scene upstairs, how, if at the end of my life I am surrounded by daughters, granddaughters, great granddaughters, sisters, nieces, and great nieces, I will have lived a great life. My dad’s nostrils flared, always wearing his emotions there, rather than his sleeve, and he did his characteristic laugh-yeah-exhale, which is really the male version of a sob.

I thought later about what it meant that my grandma was first the knower, of all these women, and then became the known. How, at the end of her life, each of us held up a tiny corner of her quilt, weaving frayed fibers back into the seam, as we tucked her into bed.

 

Liza Ruggiero is a coach, facilitator, writer, and educator whose work focuses on helping individuals experiencing life transitions – adolescents, emerging adults, and new parents – cultivate inner growth, self-compassion, and greater self-awareness.