My Grandmother

There are so many voices in our head, personal and private, demonstrative and subdued - relatives, friends, lovers, teachers. Some are indistinct, roaring tides of intimidation, full of swift, persuasive undercurrents. Others are clear and forthright, cutting through all the rest.

My grandma

There are certain times when I can hear my grandmother's voice the loudest. Most of the time, it's related to simple things - folding clothes, cleaning my apartment, taking time out to do things for myself.

Today, while sweeping away the greying veneer of dust in my apartment, was another one of those times. I wondered for a while about my grandmother, a brilliant woman with a near-photographic memory and a love of puzzles and books. I thought about her being a housewife and cleaning the same 3 1/2 rooms religiously over 40 years. How different it must have been between the days when my grandfather was still alive, everything resonant with life's promise, and decades later when the apartment had become little more than a museum, the corners of my bedroom untouched and dusted. How it must it have felt to be a bit of a stranger in your own world, caretaker to fading memories and once-cherished items fallen into disuse.

To this day, it pains me to think about my grandmother in the last couple of years of her life. And I wonder, sometimes, whether we die all at once or slowly, over years; a creeping dissolution that nibbles away at the corners of our world - sinkholes claiming friends, family and finally ... our selves.

I've imagined in more somber moments what the existence of a ghost would be like - on the peripheries of existence, barely in communication with the world. And how, at times, one can slip away into this realm without being physically dead - existing without the comfort or knowledge of peers and loved ones; essentially shut off and disconnected from the world around you.

My grandmother's world, at the end, was a simple room in an assisted-living facility. So much smaller than the near-infinite City of her youth; the Manhattan, Coney and Fire Islands that achieved mythic proportions in the stories she told me as a child. I tried, whenever I spoke with her, to push back the frontiers of that life. But I couldn't for long. There's only so much light one can carry into darkness.

But, it's wonderfully comforting to hear her voice again at times like these. And know, somewhere in my mind and heart, her world has begun to grow again.