Tuesday, November 15, 2011

There it sat on the Excel sheet, clean and elegant, the fruit of hours upon hours of sweat and tears. The formula. My formula. To be fair, I had help from teammates. There were moments of doubt when I needed to discuss the rationale behind the variables, find surety through dialogue. Enough of the formula was mine, however, where I can use possessive pronouns without the need to mince.

But spreadsheets are only tangential to tonight’s discussion. Heck, “tangential” suggests some degree of relevance, which totally isn’t the case. What I really wanted to talk about was family, specifically grandparents and grandparental interactions. You may recall I’m down to my last one, so when I learned my 86-year-old grandma would be visiting the States, with a weeklong stop in Charlotte, I vowed to take full advantage of the time given.

That I did, too, with two dinners, church, ample hugs, and long stretches of just sitting on the couch next to her as Discovery Channel played in the background. To be near: that was my goal. I wanted to achieve a sense of closeness in talk, too. While she speaks English, she prefers Mandarin, and I found myself evoking vocabulary I thought for sure I’d forgotten. That’s the Rosetta stone of necessity, I suppose. I also answered many of her same questions repeatedly, because although her clarity of thought is still there, she’s gotten more forgetful with old age. But hey! That comes with the territory. I didn’t begrudge repeating a single word.

Most moments were Hallmark-perfect, and I say this without one iota of cynicism. These were the warm contours I sought and that she appreciated. There was one moment of genuine heartbreak, though. That was on Sunday morning, right after church, when we sat on a bench outside under some crisp fall foliage. Out of the blue, she inquired about my other grandmother’s health. A few questions flashed across my mind as soon as she asked this. Had no one told her? Perhaps she knew, but then forgot? Or, and this would be grotesquely devious, did she know and merely wanted to test me?

I threw out the last scenario as being completely ridiculous. I considered telling the brutal truth, driven by an initial pang of guilt to all three grandparents who have passed. But then it dawned on me: they certainly don’t care anymore. “She’s OK,” I began. Relieved at the news, my grandma then inquired about whether she was able to walk again. “Yeah,” I said, after a pause. “Yeah, she’s doing a lot better.” It was the pleasant fiction the situation needed. And lies, I realized at that moment, are for the living–for those who would weave them, and for those who would hear them.