So. This Is Love.

Move quickly. Avoid eye contact. Blend in.

I didn’t realize I operated this way until I found myself listening to someone I’d known long enough to be familiar with and suddenly took notice of their facial features. It was like I was seeing them for the first time though we’d been in the same room day after day. Intrigued by my discovery I began looking at other people I knew, observing their features, dumbfounded by things I’d never notice but would have had I just looked a little longer.

“What do you call a stick on wheels?”

“Huh?” Replies my 91-year old, 102 pound grandma sitting in her wheelchair at the dinner table.

“My Grandma,” I answer.

“What?”

I laugh. “Never mind.”

This is the second time she’s fractured her hip in two years and the eighth year she’s lived with my parents. The house isn’t so conducive to a wheelchair so they moved my brother’s old bunk beds downstairs, separated them, and placed them in the living room – one for my grandma and one for my mom to be by her.

She can’t get up on her own anymore. She can’t put on her shoes, stand up, or use the restroom without help. Her mind once active and sharp, now dull and forgetful. “How did I end up like this?” she asked multiple times in the few hours I visited, “I never thought I would end up like this.”

Sometimes she’s sweet and sometimes she’s sour. While I’ve been lucky enough to experience more of the former, I can take no credit for the day to day work my family has done to love and provide for her even when they experience the latter. My grandma’s a sassy lady. Her favorite roast is reminding me how I was adopted into the family after she had discovered me while rummaging through the garbage. “You don’t remember?” she explained to me one day after I walked out of a Wendy’s bathroom, “that’s how we found you.”

There’s one thing about my grandma I find particularly interesting. Though I know she loves me, she can hardly ever say it. Before hanging up on the phone I’ll emphatically declare, “Bye Grandma! I love you!” “Hmmmhm, yea okay. You too.” Click.

I’m not home too often, though she always reminds me to come “choon choon choon” (soon soon soon). After she broke her hip the first time, I started to wonder if her time was coming. So I started hugging her a little longer, kissing her cheek before I left, and simply looking at her just in case I didn’t get another chance.

This past hip fracture, something told me I should go home though I already had a visit planned in two weeks. So I ran a few errands and jumped in the car on my day off for the two hour drive home.

She lay in bed, frail and weak. We got her out of bed to eat a snack, but then back she went so I joined my mom to walk the dog. We returned 45 minutes later to find my sweet grandma had gotten out of bed on her own to use the toilet but was only partially successful. We cleaned her up together, then lay her back in bed and I sat down at the living room piano to dig up the ten years of lessons buried somewhere in my hands.

So This Is Love, a Cinderella classic, popped into my head as the first song to play. I flipped open the book and began. As the last note rang I turned my head to see my grandma behind me, tucked in bed under the shimmering lights of the Christmas tree in the middle of our living room , while the sounds of my mom washing soiled clothes echoed in the hallway.

So this is love.

Holy moments are difficult to recognize until they’ve passed but this one I saw as it happened. The second was when I went over to her bedside to say hello and she held my hand as if I were leaving and for the first time said, “I love you, Susanna. I love you eternally.”

The last time I’d visited I noticed an absence in her eyes as if she’d forgotten who she was and she’d forgotten me as well. The look she gave to me as she spoke out her love was similar but not entirely. She did not know who she was, but she knew that she knew me and that I had known her. Before those words were spoken, there were a few seconds of her eyes set on mine, as if she were searching for herself. Searching for who she was to me. Searching for all the things I had learned when I had looked at her. Whatever she found, she knew it meant love.

Everything until now I wrote in 2020. My grandma lived another three years before passing away this Fall. That means three years of my brother’s old bunk bed sitting in the middle of my parents’ living room. Three years of washing soiled clothes. Three years of taking care of someone with decreasing abilities for recollection, trust and expression of gratitude.

Love is patient, love is kind...it does not dishonor others...it always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Cor. 13:4-6.

So. This is love.

I saved a voicemail my grandma left me a year before her memory faded. It ends with a simple expression of gratitude - “thanks for remembering me.”

Always, Grandma. Always.

See you choon choon choon.

Grandma's Voicemail (scroll to the bottom after clicking)