My grandmother is not one for rage. I have seen her express real irritation a few times, but that is the extent of it. It's just not who she is. If there ever was any rage, or is still, it is so effectively suppressed that it does not even simmer below the surface, alerting those who watch carefully to its existence. It's simply not there.
This has always been a bit of a wall between me and my grandmother. Or, as she is not aware of the wall's existence, I should say that it has caused me some distress in terms of my inability to better understand her. Anger and I are fairly well-acquainted, mostly in a healthy way, I like to think.
Although I know it sounds strange, I have always found it secretly refreshing, or rather reassuring, when my grandmother's irritation shows, peeking out at the edges, like a slip at a hemline. The fact that the irritation is usually targeted at my mother, who is my grandmother's oldest child and primary caretaker, complicates all this.
Basically, my grandmother knows that she needs help but resents it, likes being taken care of and wishes she didn't need to be. When she takes my mother's arm to walk across an icy driveway, it is with both relief and something less innocuous. If you look closely, you can see it: a tinge of yellow resentment.
This past weekend, I drove to my grandmother's house, where my mother makes it possible for her to live alone. I was going to pick her up and bring her back to my parents' house, to spend the rest of the day with us before we had to drive back home. As I walked out the door, my mother instructed me to help her get the right Valentine gifts, as she'd wrapped them for all of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and to take her arm to walk to the car.
When I pulled up in my grandmother's driveway, I was on the phone, finishing up a call, and in the 20 seconds it took to say good-bye and hang up, my grandmother not only--to my surprise--heard the car pull in, but selected the right gifts out of her enormous pile of them and walked all the way out the front door by herself. I jumped out and grabbed her arm before she could take a step on the driveway. "What are you doing?" I asked. "You're going to get me in trouble." She grimaced and tried to shake off my arm.
"I'm fine," she said. "Don't you walk over here. You'll slip on the ice." I walked around with her anyway, holding lightly but walking close so I could break a fall if it happened. I let her get into the seat by herself, but I stood there, just in case. And then, I walked back around and got in the driver's seat.
On the way back home we saw the biggest snowman I have ever seen. I pulled over by the side of the road, and we both stared out her window. The family who lived in the house was standing around the snowman, and the father of the family was less than half as tall as the snowman. It must have been fifteen feet tall. I asked if I could take a picture to show my five-year-old and they said sure, so I did, and after a little more staring, we started to drive again, heading up the road that connects my parents' house to my grandmother's.
"I'm almost forty," I said, "and I've never seen anything quite like that." I could see my grandmother out of the corner of my eye without turning to look at her.
"Neither have I," she said. "Neither have I."
She wasn't irritated at all when we got there, and we walked arm and arm up the steps to the house. She was tired, I could tell, and sank immediately into the couch. A trip up the street with a walk at both ends can drain her some days, and it had been a long weekend, with lots of unaccustomed activity.
I sat down, too. I watched her play Pattycake with Annika, thought about how I felt when I saw her get mad. I remembered a verse from a poem that has always struck a chord with me. This is it:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And then, for the very first time, I understood something I have inherited from my grandmother.
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