Tomorrow is my birthday and I’m dealing with it all right, except that in a very acute way I miss my grandparents.
Once upon a time, the most special thing about my birthday was that it was also my maternal grandmother’s birthday. Mutti and I celebrated together all my life, until she died two years ago, at 98.
You can hardly ask to spend longer than that with someone you love, but I miss her every day. I don’t just miss her the way she once was: vital, interested, active and busy, one of my best friends. I miss her as an old, old lady, too. She was a strong person, even in the winter of her life, after she passed 85. She was frail but aware, caring, still involved, despite her walker and hearing aid.
She always invited her friends to watch “Washington Week in Review” with her. She chaired a few groups in her retirement community — including the library committee, for she was a librarian; and the Committee on World Peace.
If you wonder what has happened to global politics, they fell apart when Mutti stopped being chairwoman.
She always ate like a bird and conducted herself with discipline and good sense. She had high standards, antique furniture and great courage. She survived the Nazis but refused to think about them. She survived losing my grandfather, David Meyer, the year before I was born, but she kept him alive in many ways.
Mutti loved classical music and literature. She read history books and biographies not only because she liked them, but also because they would “improve” her.
Once, well into her late 80s, she was rushed to the hospital gasping for breath, her lungs filling with water. My mother flew across country to sit beside her bed. Mutti was an inert figure, the weathered color of old paper, still as a statue under the sheets.
Mom quietly pulled a chair next to Mutti’s bed and sat reading the paperback romance she had purchased at the airport. Suddenly, a whispery but imperious voice from the bed demanded, “Is that the best thing you can do with your mind?”
Mutti always did the best things she could do with her mind. Talking to her was sometimes an inquisition. She would labor to get to the bottom of things. In her last good decade, as she asked her penetrating and perceptive questions, sometimes she’d repeat herself — but she still knew where she was trying to go, and her guidance was always valuable.
At the end, her body just stopped working, but it didn’t quit living. She could no longer do anything but wait. She fought.
In those last couple of years (she was in her far 90s, after all), her memory slipped away along with her hearing and her eyesight. Yet she was always glad to see me, even after she began to believe I was my mom or my aunt or my cousin. As Mutti got weaker, she refused to eat anything except tea, vanilla ice cream and butter cookies. One night, she just dozed off. Her last words, to a nurse, were, “Thank you.”
Thinking of her brings my father’s parents back to me, as well. They were also a constant and beloved part of my life well into their 80s. My genes may have made me plump and nearsighted, but they have longevity on their side.
My grandpa lived to be 82. His cherished family included two sons, five grandsons and me, a spoiled little girl. I understand he was regarded as an intimidating businessman by many who knew him, but he was the soul of caring, generosity and courtliness to me. I thought the world had lost its protective roof when he died 12 years ago, just before my oldest child, Davida, his namesake, arrived.
My paternal grandma, who has been gone almost six years now, was also my friend and counselor. She never talked to me like I was a child; we had real conversations. She would meet us at the train station when my brothers and I came into town, and take us everywhere, including a little deli where she let us stuff ourselves with immense sour pickles and corned beef on rye.
Even in that setting, she was elegant, but as always down-to-earth, practical, fun-loving, deeper than she let on.
She was the one who gave me a virtual fortune when I was 12 — five whole dollars of my very own — for an afternoon at a shopping center. She laughed indulgently when I spent the whole thing, in 10 minutes, on a marvelous book of Carl Sandburg’s poems called “Honey and Salt.” She was the only one who told me, when I was 15, to be careful what I wished for, because I might get it.
She was the one who took me to Europe, with my mother, for my high school graduation and relished every second of the time.
That relish, that appreciation for every moment, must be the message here. I was so young then that I thought they would always be with me. My grandmothers, my grandfather. They must have been the honey in my life, wrapping me with all the sweetness and none of the bitterness of their long lives. And these birthday tears, these memories — they must be the salt.