The ones that have my heart

My grandparents traveled between the U.S. and India my whole life to help raise my brothers and I. 11 years ago they moved here permanently. Not because they loved the radical climate change from tropical heat to chilling blizzards, but because their children had moved here and they needed family support that they didn’t have back there. It’s in these years since I was 18 that I truly learned who my grandparents were and what made them the cherished matriarch and patriarch of our family.

They were the game changers. My grandfather was a narcotics inspector in the countryside of South India, but he was the most mild mannered and even tempered man you’d ever meet. The most dangerous aspect of his job was regulating the mangos that monkeys tried to smuggle from farms. (This statement is solely based on a nightmare he had when we were children, not actual events). But he was loved by all and respected by the whole Indian community. He even knew more of our neighbors over the years then we did.

Active until his stroke, he tended our grapevines in the backyard, taught me how to read the Quran, and not once did he forget any of his children or grandchildren in his evening prayers. He was my ideal man, the type of man I hoped to find in the world. So pure of heart, so honest of soul that when we finally said goodbye he took part of my heart with him.

And my grandmother was the yin to his yang. She was a strong-willed woman who could command any audience. Be it her siblings or children, and most of all her grandchildren. My grandfather let her call the shots and although he occasionally grumbled to himself, he never requested her to do differently. And so 11 years into being her caretaker comes the heartbreaking realization that she is a shell of the woman she was even as recent as one year ago.
Her body is dying, and her mind wanders to years past filled with laughter, back to a time when all of her siblings were still alive and lived close by. A time when we were little and she cooked the most incredible dishes. Back when any tummy ache was cured with a prayer and warm embrace.
The tables have turned and it has been my mother, aunt and I who comfort her. I often found myself as the one holding her close at night when she had nightmares. My mother the one that brought her back to the present when she would cry out for her children that she thought were still babies lost somewhere in the house. My aunt the one who could coax her into eating meals when the rest of us failed. We became the parents, we became the matriarchs and it just feels so wrong. That was her title, one I hate to see slip away as she loses pieces of herself. But it is our reality and with it comes the realization that we have such little time left with her.
I’ve had her selfishly to myself for 11 years of my 29 and I still feel like it isn’t enough. I haven’t learned all of her secret recipes. I haven’t learned enough Urdu to actually read a book of poems fluently. I haven’t loved her hard enough to feel like it’s enough. Yet it’s torture to watch her die because I love her with as much as I know how. It’s never enough time and it’s never enough love and it’s never enough life.
But if I have to be honest I know why my grandparents were beloved by all who knew them. They made the world better. They left people their wisdom, their generosity, their goodness of heart, that is the legacy they leave behind.
And so, as I sit by her hospital bedside I try to prepare myself for our final goodbye, but she isn’t gone yet and in those rare moments of clarity she still helps me grow. She comforts me the way only a grandmother knows how. In those moments where we hold hands she knows she holds the rest of my heart.

***Editor’s Note: My Grandmother passed the day after this post was published.