Letters from an Unlikely Friendship (redux)

On grieving the past & living in the present

photo by Augusta Sagnelli

This is Part 4 of a 4-part letter exchange between me & Reena, an essayist & poet living in Northern California.

I met Reena last summer via Substack. Although we’re separated by continents & oceans & are of two different generations, we’ve developed an unexpected friendship via this letter exchange about mortality, love, & philosophy. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read the series back-and-forth:

Letter 1 (Reena) | Letter 2 (Samuél) | Letter 3 (Reena)

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Dear Reena,

Your words about grief being “simply the other side of having loved” are comforting. I believe we have spoken before, you and I, about Carl Jung and synchronicity, and I dare say it isn’t only by chance that we’re having this conversation right now, just a few days after the last of my grandparents passed away.

I always knew her as Marymom. She was 98 years old. I wasn’t close to her, although I do have fond memories of her gentle voice, well-mannered Southern accent, and consummate “ladylike” ways.

It’s a term we no longer use, and I understand why. I understand why some find the term problematic or even offensive, but I use the term “ladylike” here to allude to the time and place in which Marymom was most alive, which was a very different time and place, indeed.

Marymom was born in 1924 in the town of Hickory, North Carolina, a town that didn’t exist before 1850. She lived during a time when, for better and for worse, “ladylike” was considered a compliment to describe “the archetype of a Southern Lady,” as she was described in her obituary. But whatever your stance on language, Marymom was one of the most intelligent, polite, quietly powerful, and kind people I’ve ever known.

I can still smell her perfume, an almost too-sweet, floral scent wafting into the room before Marymom even appeared. The smell lingered when she left, too. It was the smell I came to associate with her generation—the “Greatest Generation” according to some, an exceptionally patriotic and prideful generation that came from towns like Hickory, NC, wherein polite society could still pretend that their wealth and comfort had been the results of hard work and moral righteousness alone instead of a much more complicated, unexamined southern history.

The family name mattered a lot back then, and it preceded individual identity: Marymom was the daughter of a respected doctor and was raised by politely religious folk who worked hard and dreamed of sending their children to college (her mother was among the first women in the family to go to college).

But these are all historical facts, and they have little to do with my current feelings surrounding grief and death about Marymom’s departure, because the truth is, Reena, I have not grieved my grandmother because I do not know if I’m able to, at least not in the way the movies tell me.

The memories I have of Marymom are a pastiche of old family photos and home videos and stories from my mother. I don’t remember the last conversation I had with Marymom—it would have been about fifteen years ago, over Christmas, before the Alzheimer’s took over—and the last time I saw any glimmer of radically present life in Marymom’s eyes was about a decade ago, just as her mental faculties were slowly but surely swept away by Alzheimer’s, which turns not only the patient but also the patient’s family into a passive kind of being.

The family sent her to a nursing home, where money was spent to keep her alive but never present, and given the low quality of a fulfilled life, it took a long time—too long, according to many—for Marymom to go.

As the family funds dwindled to keep her alive, a far-too common reality in the USA, Marymom was transferred to hospice, where nurses who were paid too little spent too many of their waking-hours trying to bring what had become a stranger-to-herself some small kind of comfort as Marymom slipped away from my memories within the white walls of an antiseptic place.

We seldom know how to talk about the reality of aging and death. It can be terrifying. But an image has just popped into my head: an open funeral casket filled with an empty vessel, made-up and dolled up to look like anything but the truth that it represents.

Memory, too, is a funny thing, isn’t it? In The Overstory, Richard Powers writes, “Memory is always a collaboration in progress,” and for a woman like Marymom, one of the last of her generation, I wonder who will continue collaborating in Marymom’s memory-, somebody who, for the last decade of her life, couldn’t even remember her own children’s names.

I must not be of the Lutheran mould, for Marymom would have never uttered words so dry, crass, and obtuse. But at the top of your list of words of “advice” is the one I commit most to memory: not just to be present, but to be radically present. Marymom was this to all of her four children, and I’d like to think I’m constructing a life that honors this truth: I don’t work a nine-to-five job and I am not willing to, and maybe what I’m really becoming is a Frenchman at heart, for I don’t believe it’s possible to remain radically present when the majority of our waking-life is spent doing what somebody else wants us to do.

And so my thoughts are coming full circle. I am here. I am present. I am sitting at the mezzanine café inside the Centre Pompidou. There are masterworks inside (Alice Neal has been a revelation) and hundreds of people are queuing outside in the rain to have a chance at standing in front of a masterwork, if for only a few seconds to perhaps harness the opportunity that great museums offer us: to be radically present by observing. Which is what I wanted to do here by observing Marymom’s life.

And so while I’m still thinking of her, I do not grieve her; I only feel a tinge of regret that I didn’t ask Marymom more questions about her life when she was still conscious of the present moment:

What was it like to raise four children as a house-wife in Hickory, North Carolina, where you spent an entire lifetime amongst the same places, the same people, and only ever with Sam, your first and only lover? Did you have other lovers? Can true love last a lifetime?

I wish Marymom could have read your words too, Reena, your reminder to honor our elders and to help them remember by encouraging them to keep learning and cultivating life, to believe in something new.

It’s is a myth that our elders only ever think about what has passed. I have friends in their eighties who are more alive than many thirtysomethings I know.

In one of my favorite television shows ever written, Tony Soprano sits miserably amongst beautiful women at a champagne dinner as his friend recounts tales from days of yore. “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” Tony says and storms away.

But perhaps “remember when” is only problematic when we become disenchanted with our own lives, when we grasp for memories not to feel more present but rather to escape our workaday lives, deluding ourselves into thinking that if by reminiscing about what once was, we can somehow harness the possibility of what might be once again.

As I see my parents get older, and as I get older myself, I’m taking your advice to heart: to be radically present. If we hope to live for the moment (whatever that means to us, personally), we must resist becoming a shadow of the “remember when” moments that are relegated to history books and obituaries.

The Dalai Lama said it far better than me in one of his most famous quotes when asked the question, “What surprises you most about humanity?”

“Ourselves. Because we sacrifice our health in order to make money. Then we sacrifice money to recuperate our health. And then we are so anxious about the future that we do not enjoy the present; the result being that we do not live in the present or the future; we live as if we are never going to die, and then die having never really lived.”

Here’s to living in the here and now, and to remembering to live in the present, and to rejecting the idea that a life well-lived can ever be properly summarized in the past-tense.

Sincerely,

Samuél