Gifts of my Grandmother

I keep a beloved picture of my grandmother Philly on the wall of my yoga room.  In this picture, she is holding my newborn daughter for the first time.  Philly is dressed in a white floral patterned house dress and wears a wristwatch on each hand even though she can no longer keep track of time.  Her hair, white as snow now and wiry, is combed back from her still smooth olive-skinned face.  My daughter also dressed in a pink floral dress onesie is entwined in my grandmother’s arms, her chubby arms and legs flowing out from the tender embrace of her great grandmother.  Their eyes lock onto each other’s, in wonder and newness and also reunion. Not as much strangers but prodigal intimates.

When this picture was taken, Philly had been living in a nursing home for seven years.  It wasn’t an easy place to visit let alone live in, sharing a room with another ill, frail, or confused resident with only a thin curtain separating the beds and the shared bathroom. During the long days, residents in this not to fancy place were parked in wheelchairs in the hallways filled with uneasy smells and sounds, or the small tv room with the vinyl chairs and noise from the daytime shows. Nurses and attendants dipped in and out bringing residence medicines, food, or wheeling them down the hall for showers and toileting. 

When I visited, I would sometimes find Philly in her room, sitting in her wheelchair by the window that looked out at the Charles River.  The River was familiar to her.  She lived across from it, downstream, in the two-family house she lived in with Nunzio and her children and then later my father and me (with my mother) in the downstairs apartment.  When sun was out, the river would sparkle and filter through the oak leaves surrounding the parking lot of the nursing home.  During some part of the afternoon, light would stream into the window in a warming way. I took this picture of Philly holding my daughter by this window overlooking the river.

Philly would flash me a bright toothless smile when I visited.  She had dentures but kept them in her pocket because they hurt her gums.  Greeted by her warm familiar face, the unease of the smells and noises, the impossible sadness of the place would fade away as I was swept up in her comforting presence, the same presence that held me since my birth.  In home that could be chaotic, her presence like a mountain rising up from the wilderness was an anchoring stability.

The day she met E, when I placed my daughter in her arms, the clouds of confusion seemed to part as she embodied once again the loving grandmother who protected and nurtured me as a child.  She seemed to come back to herself as she gazed with joy into E’s tiny face.  As grandmothers and mothers instinctually do, she gathered E up to her face to nuzzle the soft baby cheeks with her lips.  She murmured the sing-song cooing sounds I remembered as a child and then embraced E with her whole big body the way she had held me, my cousins, her three children. She was grandmother in herself again, back in the two-family house on Charles River Road, welcoming another child into her world. 

I felt then how my daughter was not only a part of me and her father, but of the great flow of love through our ancestors, like this grandwomen who showed me unconditional love.  And with her life, took care of the family through her bodily labor, now failing, with the day after day meals, laundry, housecleaning, and the cooking, cleaning, and caring for others to help make ends meet. She did this with great courage, hope and generosity, through all that she lost in her life, endured, and sacrificed, a woman who was not given many options, choices, or control over what she could do with her life. 

When I offered up my tiny daughter into my grandmother’s arms, it was like placing her on a holy alter as a gift, a gratitude for the grandwoman who had helped usher this new life into this world through all she had done to help us get this far.