I spent a long weekend in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Mom and Becky and I all met there to spend some time with my grandmother, who’s living in an assisted living facility. Three more soul-deadening words were never spoken, although I was relieved to find that the place my grammy lives is quite nice and well run and that the people are friendly. But still. Still, an assisted living facility.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I knew Grammy had developed some dementia last spring and had, for a time, been really sick. My mom was flying from Miami to Michigan about every three weeks at that point, and trying to figure out what to do and where to go and what would happen. She’s been in a new wing of the “retirement community”for about six months now and seems to have stabilized pretty well, from what I can see. She would outright tell us when she was confused or tired and I think my mom handled those times really well: she’d just say something like “We’re going to lunch now, so put on your jacket and hat and we’ll get ready to go,” and that would be that. She was very passive and said “I don’t know” a lot but she was willing to do whatever we suggested. We spent a lot of time just sitting around together while I cursed my knitting and had to rip out yet another six inches of too-big hat. We looked at some beautiful old pictures and listened to harp music and cooked dinner and things like that. It was pretty low-key. Her apartment is absolutely tiny but all four of us managed to fit in fine.
Saturday night my mom invited a bunch of family and Grammy’s friends to come to a little dinner party held in one of the public rooms. I saw people I hadn’t seen for ten years, minimum, including my excellent aunt, uncle and cousin who live in Ann Arbor and who were fantastic in every way. There was casserole (cheese-chicken-and-broccoli) and homemade pie with Cool Whip. My grandmother’s college roommate was there as well as a new friend of hers who told a story about cheerfully and mistakenly ordering a plate of penises instead of vegetables when she was living in Bangkok in the fifties. My Great-Aunt Ida Mae confided to my sister, during a discussion about hair color, that she’d once dyed her hair black and that, quote, “IT MADE ME LOOK LIKE A WHORE.” I wished I could have listened to my Great-Aunt Ida Mae and her best friend (and sister-in-law!) Great Aunt Millie talk all night long (“You think we lived in a nunnery back then?”). I had an image of all the old people in the room when they were around my age and I wondered if any of them could have predicted where they’d be and what they’d be doing when they were eighty or eighty-five. I thought a little about when I will be eighty-five and what my life will look like; I have no idea, like most people probably, so I thought that probably they hadn’t either when they were almost thirty. I don’t know whether to be comforted or alarmed by this conclusion.
I don’t know this side of the family very well and I had a hard time imagining my mom as a part of their lives. She told us all about growing up on the farm when we were little and of course we got to spend summers there a couple of times, so I can sort of see that. What I can’t imagine is Mom having stayed in Michigan instead of going to Mexico and then New York and then Canada and then Miami. I can’t imagine her with a casserole recipe or with a regular husband. I guess it goes without saying that I can’t imagine myself there, as her daughter, maybe having grown up near my awesome aunt and uncle and having them come to my graduations and spending every holiday with them and the rest of the family. Of course I can’t imagine growing up in Queens or something as my dad’s daughter either, so I don’t know where that leaves me or whatever family connection I have. I technically have relatives (I’ve seen quite a few of them in the past month or so, on both sides) but I don’t feel much a part of a family at this point.
And of course I don’t think I will ever marry and I am almost certain I won’t have children so I don’t see this feeling going away anytime soon. I do sort of feel if that’s true, if I’m not going to start my own family then I should throw caution to the wind and become a National Geographic reporter and travel the world and die from malaria so that I don’t have to depend on my soon-to-be-nonexistent Social Security. I mean, if I don’t need the security of an office job then why not, you know? This doesn’t change the fact, though, that I don’t feel very connected to my family of origin for the most part and that if I don’t start my own family then, you know, I just don’t have one. Is that why I have such a hard time imagining myself at eighty, because I won’t be surrounded by people who have known me for a long time? Because maybe at eighty I’ll just pretty much be alone? It’s hard to say.