“Life is a series of numbers and shapes, mostly full circles.” My grandma taught me that.
At my grandmother’s funeral in late September of 2013, I was asked to speak on behalf of the family. Her daughter (my mom) had been diagnosed with something called Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD for short) the year prior. It’s a form of dementia that affects your ability to communicate, mostly due to the loss of semantic memory (i.e. knowing that a cookie is called a cookie, recognizing a toothbrush as a toothbrush and then knowing what to do with it). The loss of semantics ultimately affects communication, executive functioning, and motor planning. My mom’s lack of language unfortunately disqualified her from honoring her mom in a more traditional sense when she passed on. I became the runner up.
In my dedication, my grandmother was described as a woman of numbers, able to spit off the birthdays of all of her children and grandchildren. She had a unique ability to recognize (if not, memorize) all of our phone numbers on the caller ID – and, she loved to play number games: Yahtzee, Uno, and Poker, among many. She’d play the lottery every week, playing the same numbers each time. The numbers were those that corresponded to the birthdays, anniversaries, and phone numbers of her people – the numbers she had committed to memory. Interestingly, these numbers and quantities had a way of qualifying her life. They held more than their numerical value; they held the value of those she loved most.
Writing a dedication about her was challenging. My relationship with her had become a little messy, mostly distant. My mom had been exhibiting odd behaviors and signs of disease for nearly a year (probably more), and our family was anxious and eager to understand what was happening. Shortly before my mom was diagnosed with FTD in late 2012, I’d received a Halloween card in the mail from my grandma, as I did every holiday since I could remember. In it was an outdated coffined Halloween pun à la Hallmark, the same crisp $5 bill, followed by “Love and kisses, Gma Pat” as she’d always signed. But, in between a rhymed couplet about ghosts and ghouls and her reliable, steadfast sign off, was a typed note. One that did not fit within the context of a juvenile card housed in a bright orange envelope.
It’s worth noting that this note was typed because my grandmother had Multiple Sclerosis (MS, for short). The majority of the effects of the disease presented in her legs, but her fine motor skills were also challenged. Writing took more time, mostly energy. This typed note was one that expressed disdain for the fact that I lived two and a half hours away. It urged that I needed to leave my job in Austin, come home to Houston, and take care of my mom. It included words like “selfish” and “rude.” My sister received that same note. She was newly 16 years old and was already driving our mom to and from daycare, before and after school. The irony.
It was too much. How could she have said those things? Especially to my sister? And in a Halloween card? I’d recently graduated college, had a job in a field I was set on pursuing professionally, and was working towards grad school. The guilt that I had already felt about being far away was amplified after reading those words. My grandma was angry, mostly scared. Though, I wouldn’t realize that until later. Right now, I was scared, mostly angry.
Within months after that note was written, my grandma’s health rapidly declined. In addition to having MS, she’d been a lifetime smoker and had contracted lung cancer that was spreading into other parts of her body. I’d concurrently decided to move to France to live as an au pair for a family. With everything going on, it was a tough decision to make. The “now or never”-ness of the opportunity was what ultimately helped me take the leap. You can’t plan timing.
She died just weeks before I took off.
My grandmother lived with MS for most of her adult life. She lived alone all of that time: first with a cane, then a walker, then a motorized scooter, without help from anyone. She didn’t let any of that slow her down – she was stubborn, but strong; she was quick-fused, but loving. Emotion wasn’t something she liberally expressed, but, when she did, it poured out of her in extremes. Looking back, the love that she had was welling inside of her, but it often got caught in her throat: mumbling words through tears or reacting in anger. She had a hard time processing and articulating the vulnerabilities of life: familial moves across the country, regular steroid injections, and trips to the doctor to mitigate the symptoms of an incurable disease, as well as her daughter’s diagnosis. A diagnosis that likely brought up a lot of shame and guilt around the inability to help save her daughter, or help her daughter and her family live a balanced, normal life.
I’ll never really know the whole truth, but my grandmother was so scared and so sad for my mama. She took it out on other members of her family because she didn’t know how to process something so heavy and complex. This fear manifested in her feeling like she wasn’t enough, couldn’t be enough, and couldn’t do enough – much of that likely due to the physical limitations of her own health. Thinking about the work that I do now, teaching yoga and movement in the most accessible way I can, I see those same fears play out in how I reach my students. Couldn’t I have offered some of these practices to my grandmother, to my mom, and (by golly!) to myself however many years ago? Am I somehow making up for lost time?
Toward the end of my year-long stay in France, my “French family” and I found ourselves vacationing on a beach in a coastal town. Walking along the shore, sand between my toes, I thought about how in years past, my grandmother never really had the luxury of doing this. Living in France, sure, but merely the simplicity of walking barefoot in the sand. Walking at all. A wave of gratitude washed over me – how lucky was I?
In that moment, the wind kicked up, and several euro bills went fluttering and flying through the air. We were the only folks on this beach by a longshot, so someone had clearly dropped their money a little while earlier. I collected the cash and ran over to show my French family, exclaiming that I had “just won the lottery,” and that this little gift from the gods would buy us all dinner that night. That word, “lottery,” felt foreign to my ears, coming out of my mouth – and not only because I was in a foreign country speaking a foreign language. I hadn’t been one to bet on numbers or to play la loterie. But I realize now how I placed my bets on other things. Things like moving overseas, finding happiness in places that my mom and family weren’t, and knowing that our love doesn’t really know time or distance, or disease, or dementia. It took another moment to realize that this day happened to be August 3rd: my grandmother’s birthday.
The years since her passing and the progression of my mom’s disease have brought more “a-ha” moments, understanding, and clarity, though equally more guilt, confusion, and heaviness. It’s been a process, processing the life and death of my grandmother and her influence on my life, my mom’s life, and the family dynamics that have defined who we are. I don’t have my mom’s verbal accounts or memories to help contextualize what I am only starting to try to understand. It’s tough: ebbs and flows; high waves, low tides. I discover more and more that drawing circles in the sand only guarantees that they’ll get washed or blown away. Every day, I aim to live by the understanding of this principle of cycles, circles, and impermanence.
Several years, miles, defining numbers, and milestones later, I recently found myself with my husband on a different beach with the same family in France. Bracing myself on top of a big dune, the wind was gusting and sand flying haphazardly, mostly horizontally. Out of nowhere, I spotted a few euro coins that had been dropped in the sand. I walked over, showed my French family, and once again exclaimed that I had “won the lottery.” They promptly reminded me of a similar day five years prior when I had won the lottery, and how France must be lucky for me. I reflect upon the many facets of this “luck.” This particular day was on September 16th, the anniversary of my grandmother’s death.
It’s not lost on me that she was somewhere on those two different days and on the days in those years between. Or, at the very least, that I was connecting dots and drawing lines in a way that pointed to my healing, my understanding of my grandmother, my understanding that her anger, fear, and strangely impeccable way of remembering birthdays was my own. We were cut from the same cloth. But the way our emotions – my fear of the unknown, my mom’s health, how it was affecting my family – manifested wasn’t entirely different. Those were the same things my grandmother grappled with before she left us. It was unfinished business, it wasn’t spoken, but on August 3rd and September 16th, five years apart gave me a little more closure. The full circle had filled a hole in my heart.
