A PORTRAIT OF MY GRANDMOTHER

The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

– Homer

Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.

– Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

She stands tall and wiry at the window. Her hair still thick short curls as they had been when she met my grandfather sixty years ago at a party in Oxford, when she was the protégé of a famous Austrian sculptor, when she was 18.

Her face now beautifully lined. Cracked like the Australian outback. Skin that I wished I could run my fingers over but for the icy cool blue eyes that stare back at you. Always a tight leather belt clinched at the waist with a smooth brass buckle holding in a small flat belly that had borne five children.

In the small little dining room is a large picture of the Dali Lama smiling forgivingly. Around are many small sculptures, smooth bronze and stone, all of them perfectly displayed. Not a place one lived would live in, the table a museum of a life, photos and ornaments take the place of plates and cups. And postcards of famous artists line the walls with their names labeled neatly underneath in tight handwriting.

She is watching a robin. It hops and takes flight to the next branch of the magnolia tree in the garden below. It’s cheerful chat comes up through the window and my grandmother smiles. The day is indefinable. Grey and mild, it could be any day. And to her it is. You see, my grandmother doesn’t know about time. She doesn’t know anything. She exists in a world of NOW.

A few days back I had to dismantle an artist’s studio. We moved my grandmother out for a week and took down every paintbrush and chisel from the room to make space for a live-in care worker. The layers of thirty years of creative harvesting in this small room at the top of her house now cleared and neatly packed away in the attic. She knows nothing. And she will never know. When she does remember the fear engulfs her, in her lucidity she remembers that days, weeks and eventually months have been lost and she is floating in a world of light and dark.

I’m not sure if this clear out is betrayal or helping her forget her former self. To me she is still grand and terrifying and beautiful, in fact more beautiful because she has left behind the terrors and insecurities of this world. She is like the little robin dancing from one branch to the next with no care in the world, often smiling to herself about an old deep memory of when she was truly happy.