I Get Sentimental
I have had my heart broken at least a hundred times a day since the day I was born.
It’s been two years since I started reading this book. I have read 68 books this year, but this is not one of them.
The last time I saw my nana before she got sick was Memorial Day weekend, 2022. Three months later, she’d be gone. I sat at the counter and watched her chop onions for the Indian food she was making with her friend, Manjit. We chatted while I crocheted a sweater, which I have also intentionally left unfinished, and when we went shopping, she bought me a jacket that still hangs in my closet with its tags, forever unworn.
They had planned a trip to Europe right after our visit, and on that trip, likely while partying in Biarritz, she got covid and it never went away. At the very end of her life, she had been intubated because one of her lungs had collapsed during a procedure. She hadn’t wanted this, but I was grateful for it. It gave me the few days I needed to get to her, to tell her that, I too, know how many lives we have lived together.
The tubes had been removed by the time I got there, but she couldn’t breathe on her own anymore. I flew into SFO and took the BART to the Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre stop. And then I waited. I wasn’t in a hurry. Once they came to get me, we were going straight to the hospital, where some of her closest friends had come to say goodbye to her earlier that morning. Now if I could do it again, I would move faster.
She’d been sick for over a month, and when she died, it was on her terms, just like most everything else she ever did. In my eyes, Nana lived the perfect kind of life, with a husband who loved and cared for her (but left her to her own devices), in the house she’d dreamed of (but had cleaned by someone else weekly), with a full social life and many fulfilling hobbies (because she’d been able to retire decades before).
Nana was well-traveled and well-read. She had stories and was good at telling them. She was the kind of woman you kept jokes with, one you wrote to, someone who would tell you the truth even if it wasn’t what you wanted to hear. She was the kind of woman I hope I become. I hope I’m the kind of woman she would have wanted to befriend, even if I hadn’t been her granddaughter and she hadn’t had to.
At the hospital, I had hope. I didn’t think she looked that bad. She said, “Hey, Keke,” in her characteristic way, just like every other time I saw her. She’d just had her 80th birthday. She could have a lot of life left. But what kind of a life is one where you’re on 100% oxygen? I’d packed to stay for a week, but she died the first night I was there.
I have always been such a sensitive soul, but if I can manage, I never let them see me like that. Before I became more guarded and a little hardened, the slightest wind could make me fall apart like a tornado had hit me. When I was a little girl, I cried every time my dad played Little Wing by Stevie Ray Vaughan. I could never tell a lie because my tears would immediately betray me. I still can’t. And even when they were right beside me, I have always missed everyone I’ve ever known, and even some I haven’t. I have had my heart broken at least a hundred times a day since the day I was born.
A month after, I let myself in through the garage while my grandpa was working in the city. Being alone in the house that she would never again return to fucked me up in a way that words don’t make sense of and that cannot be mended. I am now one of those women who can make herself cry on command because I haven’t truly stopped crying for twenty-seven months. Maybe I just won’t.
But still, I know that I am lucky. I am so incredibly fucking lucky. I know how fortunate I am to have loved someone so much. How grateful I am to have been loved so well by her, to have been seen as a treasure by someone so treasured.
Like me, Nana kept books all over the house. She had bestsellers and memoirs with dogeared pages, paperback novels with creases in their spines, and spiritual tomes read many times over. The one I chose was on the bottom shelf of a bookcase in the back room, its weathered yellow hardcover drawing me in. Pearl S. Buck. Mandala. It was one I’d never heard of. Sanskrit for circle. Used to hold one’s attention.
When somebody dies and you are going through their things, if you can manage to bend yourself just right, you can be awed. Isn’t it fascinating for someone to hold onto a Thing for many, many years? What is so special about this Thing that it has survived so many moves and several different lives? Isn’t it amazing to consider?
This version of the book was published in 1970, and the edges of its pages are framed by that characteristic tan color, the one that foretells a certain softness, the one of a leaf that wants to be turned. These are the promises that come with a book that’s aged. The shade a page takes on when the book vows to have the kind of just-right scent of book that you hope for in an old novel.
For weeks, I stayed in the guest room and went through her closet, snooping in the drawers of her kitchen, looking for anything handwritten. I’d hoped for recipes, but that wasn’t something she was likely to pen. She just knew.
At night, I’d lay in bed and read from this book. I stopped at page 210, and there I rest. “Mandala–A schematized representation of the cosmos, chiefly characterized by a concentric organization of geometric shapes, each of which contains an image of a deity or an attribute of a deity. A symbol representing the effort to reunify the self.”
One day, when I’m ready, I’ll start over at the beginning, but not yet.