My great grandmother is 89 years old. She has beautiful, pure-white hair and kind, smart eyes. When I first knew her, she colored her hair so it was brown and she always carried a handbag that I loved to sort through. It was like treasure hunting and even though I knew I’d always find a few butterscotch candies and a glasses case with a colorful pattern, rediscovering these items on every visit never ceased to excite me. When she first knew me, I was small with legs that were too long for the rest of my body and a mop of curly blonde hair. I wanted to be a princess, and I had memorized every line in Disney's "The Little Mermaid." She always bought me twirly-princess-dresses for my birthday and Christmas upon my request. We were fast friends.
She’s older now, and so am I, but to be honest, she’s still very much the same. Yes, sometimes she accidentally calls me Jennifer (my mother’s name) and her hair is white now, but these are not the things that make me feel the weight of her age and mine. Instead I feel the weight in the time we spend together. The significance of each visit hangs in the air like the smell of rain; fringed on the edge of my consciousness but always recognizable. Perhaps this is because our visits have become less frequent; as my life has blossomed into a steady chaos of commitments, hers has slowed a bit and, inevitably, seeing each other happens less. Or perhaps its because I’m finally old enough to recognize how much I can learn from every sentence she puts together, every moment that makes her happy and the constant choice she makes to make an effort to be with my family even though traveling is no longer easy for her.
These are the things I learned from our last visit.
1. Being loved can and should make you stay.
I was away for three months this summer and I felt like I grew immensely, but talking to my Nana made me realize how much it weighted on my family. "The only thing missing at the fourth of July was you, Anna!" she told me. This endearing statement pulled at my heart stings and made me realize that when people care about you like that, when you mean that much to them, and they likewise mean that much to you, it makes a lot of sense to stay if you can. Adventures are important, but so are the people who's handbags were once your source of adventure.
2. Places don’t replace people.
All we were doing was sitting in a cottage on a lake in Maine. She was telling me about the jazz music concerts that happen in her assisted-living home in the summer sometimes on Fridays. It was a quiet, predictable place. It wasn't a beautiful mountain top or a blue beach, but I was happier sitting there with her then I had been sitting alone on one of the most beautiful beaches in Nicaragua.
3. Being happy where you are is not about being somewhere exotic.
She tells me a lot about her assisted-living home. It was a big decision a year and a half ago for her to move there. She's an incredibly capable woman, but she explains that moving there was one of the best things for her. She tells me about her friends, how they sit together at lunch and how death can make the place sad sometimes. "But," she says, "We're all really very happy there." It makes me think that perhaps, being happy where you are is about being able to say "we" it's about belonging, its not quite as much about being in a place that looks cool on Instagram.
4. Routine is important.
"There are always people around Anna," she says, "I never get lonely!" But sometimes she likes to be alone. "Every night after dinner I could go sit in the reading room with my friends or listen to the music, but most times, I go back to my room and sit in the quiet and do my crossword puzzles, and that is usually my favorite time of day." No matter what it is, whether it's doing crosswords or going for a run, or going out to breakfast every week with your best friend, having one thing you can count on to make you happy is very important.
5. Independent is of one the bravest things one can be, but it doesn’t mean we don’t still need good people in our lives.
As we sat, my Nana explained to me how she has drifted from a lot of her friends from earlier in life. "We used to golf together, but now that I'm here, we just don't have that much in common anymore," she says. "They all have their husbands and I don't. When I lost Frank all those years ago, I had to learn how to be independent and find other independent people." At first hearing her say that made me very sad, and then it made me incredibly proud of her. She'd figured out how to make it work. She is very independent, yet, she still leans on all of us and we lean back on her. "I just feel so lucky," she told me, "because some of my friends in the home feel like their families resent them. But not me. I always have a place to go during the holidays."
As much as we are all afraid of getting older and having our minds and bodies slow, my great grandmother makes me excited for the wisdom that time can give me if I let it. In all the phases of life, finding happiness looks different, but I'm optimistic that the more times we do it, the better we will all get at it, at least that's what my Nana makes me believe.
