Love

The day after returning from Tahoe, I had to pack up and head to SFO to board a flight to Tokyo. My grandmother had insisted on having dinner together my last evening in the bay area so it became my brother's responsibility to drive me to the airport at 8:30 am the next morning. Not too happy to have to wake up early on a Sunday morning, he insisted I had to drive to the airport so he could sleep in the passenger seat, which I thought was a fair proposition.

When I woke up the next morning, my grandmother had already been up for hours, making sure I hadn't forgotten to pack anything and making a final pot of ginger-date-honey tea for my neverending sore throat, which she'd been feeding me during my entire stay. As my brother and I lugged my two gigantic, overweight suitcases (filled with 3 months of US and Vanity Fair magazines, cereal, toothpaste, several new books, new clothes and all my snowboarding gear other than my board) down the stairs, my grandmother came over and tried to help me with my suitcase. My frail, arthritis-inflicted 75 year old grandmother furrowed her eyebrows with concern, worried that I would strain myself. As always, putting her self concern away in the face of the slightest hint of discomfort for her grandchildren, she kept trying to help me lift the enormous suitcase. And as always, the only way I could get her to stop (because (1) I don't want her to strain herself because she is getting more and more frail and (2) I especially don't want her to strain herself when her attempts to help would only make it more difficult) was to snap at her to step away. My grandmother will ALWAYS do everything possible to ease any burden off me - if I tell her nicely that it's ok, she will still try and try and try until at some point I snap at her that I can do it. I think (or at least, I hope) she understands that I snap at her because as much as she wants to ease my burdens, I want to ease hers. I don't want her to do anything that exhausts her or causes her even the slightest pain because these days, her frailty is visible, a constant reminder that she is getting older.

I remember the first time I realized that death was a real part of life. I was eight and had just finished reading some book where a character died in the end and for some reason, this made me realize that one day my grandmother would pass away. That night, I cried and cried and cried, for even then, the thought of living in a world without my grandmother was the saddest thing I could ever imagine. And that's still true today.

So these days, I am always reminding her to exercise and stretch in order to keep her joints healthy, to not worry so much about others in order to keep her mind healthy, to not do anything to strain herself (even if that means not getting to eat her delicious kimchi, which in my totally unbiased opinion is the best kimchi on planet earth).

This wasn't always the case of course. I cringe when I think about what an ungrateful granddaughter/daughter (I say daughter because it's commonly said amongst my family that my grandmother basically raised me and that our relationship as a mother-daughter is closer than her relationship with her actual three children) I was growing up. During my adolescence, I had so much anger - at my parents for always failing me, at God for taking my stepmother through liver cancer (quite possibly the most agonizing way to die), at constantly having to change schools, at the lack of stability in my life, at just...being let down. I was an incredible pain to deal with during this period. Some of the adults in my life told me: all this unhappiness is because you're unrepetant, so repent (um, I think single-handedly the worst thing you can say to a teenager who is trying to understand why shit happens, and seems to happen more often to her than others). My own parents said nothing, believing that if they ignored me and the situation, I would be fine. In any case, they weren't really around to say anything anyway - my mother had chosen to give up custody to my father and my father was constantly trying to revive his flailing businesses, then tending to my stepmother during her illness, then tending to his own broken heart after she passed away.

But one person just loved me. When I shut myself down from others, she let me be. When I needed to vent frustrations, she listened. She did my laundry. Made me my favorite foods. And on chilly winter days while I got ready for school, she would go down to the car 5 minutes before we needed to leave to heat the car up and wipe down the condensation that had formed on all the windows overnight. I was reminded of this long-lost memory the morning I left the house and got in my brother's Jeep to drive to the airport a couple weeks ago. As we loaded the luggage into the car and I stepped into the driver's seat, she exclaimed that I wouldn't be able to see with the condensation on the windshield and started frantically wiping them down. With her bare frail hands. I yelled at her to stop, that she would freeze her hands off, that she would trigger her arthritis. But the memory of all those days she woke up early to heat the car up for me and wipe the windows came back to me. And as I drove to the airport, I couldn't help but think (for probably the billionth time), that the thing I am most grateful for in life is being my grandmother's granddaughter. Because she taught me what love is, and that saved me.