my grandmother co-raised me; my mom had to leave for her post-graduate program in another city, a year after i was born, and for the next five years, save for her short visits, i was with my grandparents and my father. they all adored me and i was safe and looked after, that's not the point. my grandmother died many (by now) years ago, outliving grandfather by a slim margin. he died of lungs cancer, marking a stop of my childhood. she died of esophageal cancer, slowly dwindling away into saint nothingness on white sheets, at home. i was home for the summer of her dying, but ran back to my hectic post-university existence before the autumn of her death; i was afraid. i loved her a whole lot.

(what a tiny little phrase! how tidy and widely applicable it is. in all its economical English glory. i loved her a whole lot, love her loved her. this page is not really about the love i had for my grandmother, but rather about remembering my grandmother from another angle - but i loved her so goddamn much, and her passing wounded me so badly, and muddled into incomprehensible, painful paste of those back days. i dream of her sometimes; i take her traveling in my dreams, and when i'm awake, i put on her green stone ring when i'm going somewhere interesting. her name was maria, and she worshipped the sun, in the small house religion of her own making. her life was one of those little wheat stalks caught between the bloody and rusty cogs of my country, and slipped in and out of it mostly unseen. may she rest in the glory of the garden she deserved.)

grandmother was, as one remembers now:

• incredibly tactless, as laughingly known by the entire family; her inability to make a compliment was a staple joke at the family gatherings;
• incredibly sensitive to the spiciness, texture and temperature of food; when she didn't have to cook for the family and only made food for herself, she exclusively switched to very mild and bland food, very carefully modulate temperature, no spices, barely any salt;
• morally rigid, stubborn, very determined, very set in her routines;
• with some tactile tics that sometimes infuriated us - she squeezed, pinched, patted; i'm pretty sure that she would've bit too, if she could frame it to herself as acceptable.

she was incredibly, patiently kind, even with all her sharp angles and sudden resentments, carefully nursed grudges, flares of temper. she taught me how to take away headache and how to touch people when they hurt. she adored my gregarious, loving, kind, alcoholic, rapidly veering grandfather for the fifty years they spent together, nd despaired of her daily. i think now - of course - that she was autistic, and think with quiet adoration and horror how incredibly hard it was for her to raise her three daughters, and then us - children of the middle child, her adored grandchildren - in the loud, rough, chafing, instable within and without, constantly changing world she lived in. my grandmother, the caryatid. my grandmother, endlessly rolling her stone up the hill.

in her last years she walked every day, and read voraciously; told me a bit of her childhood, of her youth - always bits and pieces that i, trying to listen and curious for, was still too far away to truly hold onto for - and did 'tibetan exercises' for her fingers and hands, scooped out of cheap new age magazines that proliferated (years later i will recognize in them the scientifically evidenced brain gym practices, and think again of how desperate she must've been for any sort of self regulation, or help, or name for who she was), and took her tea mild, and wrote careful letters in careful, round handwriting.

then the tumor closed up her throat, and she faded away. (redacted, redacted, redacted - the stopped clock of slow dying, no.)

her name was maria; she was utistic, i'm her heir. i loved her a whole lot. i wish somebody had the words - the knowledge - the space and time to make her life easier, in a myriad of ways, while she was alive. i wish i wish.