Grace.

I remembered her tonight as I drank organic blueberry-pomegranate juice. I thought that grandma should have some, and that mom should bring her some next time in a Tupperware sippy cup. Maybe mom will find a straw in the kitchen. Grandma doesn’t eat much anymore, nothing solid. Most things come back up again anyway. So if mom brings her this juice, she’ll really like it. And blueberries are good for you.

I’m not anywhere near her nursing home, and I’m not anywhere near my mom. And my grandma isn’t around anymore, not even at the nursing home, but I swore for a split second as I tasted the gritty blueberry seedlings, feeling them between my teeth, that she was still in that permanent and helpless state. How I got used to that. The decline and perpetual drowning. Completely submerged at the bottom of the pool, the weight just won’t let up to at least free the body to float to the surface. How permanent a slow decline can be, how indefinitely hopeless, permanently not alive and not dead.

I hate that when I think of her I don’t remember the good times. I just remember in flinching seconds that she was never going to get better, that she was so heavy on my mother’s ankles as they sank together. Robbery. Senility robs what I have a right to, a grandmother or at least the memory of one. Her illness stole my memories.

I remembered her tonight as the tangy juice slid down my throat, how I watched my mother’s anger flare up at her because she’d spit back the food, let it drip from her chin down her shirt onto her hands. She’d swat at my mother’s hand as she tried to dry the kasha from her face, swat, slap slap slap. How angry my mother got.

Anger. It sounds like a foreign country, or maybe Angieres. Seething Salem. Panicking Palermo. Defeated Djibouti. Ignore me, I’m just playing with my mom’s emotions or how she must have felt at times. I spent one evening with my grandma, trying to coax her to eat something and I started to feel the weeeeiiiiiiigggggggggggghhhhhht of her age and illness and she looked like Smeagol and I loved her and was angry at her at the same time.

How shame takes hold of us and bares us for all to see. I am ashamed that I just said that my grandma looked like Smeagol, but when the movie first came out, I couldn’t stop thinking of the similarity. How comforting to see that she was well, crawling around on all fours calling something precious, having a desire for something [delectably disturbing].

Goddamned anger. How do you communicate with someone who’s gone? She was gone twelve years before she really left, and when she passed I was relieved. There’s no sense to that. She’d sometimes say in Russian, “I don’t want to live.” Ten days before she died we took her downstairs to the room with parakeets in it, wrapped her in her blue blanket, and placed her by the couch. My brother read, I did too. I don’t know what mom did, but it was grandma’s last birthday.

When she was laid out on her bed, she was straight for the first time in years. I always saw her scrunched up, hunched over even when she was lying down. Bony elbows and shoulders jutting out at neomodern angles (architects would be proud).

I didn’t want to talk about this.

My blueberry-pomegranate juice evoked a memory, and I just wanted to make her well again, the same way my mom tried to feed her blintzes by mushing them up first. Or when mom packed fresh blackberries and grandma ate them one after the other grinding the seeds between her yellow teeth. I worried she’d get diarrhea and mom was glad she was eating something.