Orbits Around My Grandmother: On the Anxiety of Loneliness

I bought a kilo of whole coffee beans from India. They were a luxury I would be forced to lug around for the rest of my travels, and as my aunt rose one questioning brow, I found myself at a loss for words. They smelled like chiseled wood, like red berries, like roasted earth and cacao and paan. They smelled the way any kid returning from a childhood visit to Mumbai will tell you. I imagined holding a glass jar in front of me, large enough to stand pregnant with three liters of liquid, and pouring the beans into its gaping mouth. A sparrow aching to be fed the fruit of its mother. I wondered how the smell would waft upward, the way the dry dust of roasted beans would settle in my nose until the bittersweetness tinged everything I encountered.

I knew exactly what kind of jar I was looking for, too—the kind that used to hold something else, with a sticky label that had peeled off and left behind that white residue of paper refusing to wash off the front of the jar. These were my mother’s jars, which took after my grandmother’s jars—the original jars, all plastic fake-glass with blue lids, all the same because they were delivered regularly and with the same contents thanks to one elderly assistance program or another. I imagined my grandmother, at the door when the jars arrive, insisting on the strenuous work of bending down and emptying the jar of its contents, placing its discarded, government-mandated insides to the side and instead, lovingly, carefully, feeding the jar colorful lentils and chickpea batter snacks. Mother bird knowing best.

I didn’t know how to explain it to my aunt at the time, but the purchase wasn’t about the coffee beans. It was about my grandmother’s jars, which stand seven to a row and stacked five shelves high, a colorful menagerie of lentils and dried peppers and yellow chickpea batter. It was about the way she stood, at four feet ten, on a wobbly chair and insisted on taking the jars down herself. It was about the way she refused anyone’s help, the way she acted as if no one was there, the way she gave those precious jars her undivided attention even when I sat mere feet away.

At the time, I painted it in bright colors, independence.

I carved it, stubbornness that runs through the veins of my mother and her mother, and hers before hers before hers before her.

I tattooed it under my skin, this is the vigor that runs through my veins.

I never thought to call it by its far simpler name. Loneliness.

*

In a housing complex built in the ’60s and whose remaining original residents find themselves outliving their neighbors and friends, and then outliving any new friends, too, Norimitsu Onishi profiles Chieko Ito. “A Generation In Japan Faces A Lonely Death,” Onishi titles the piece, leaving no room for misunderstanding: Ito—though living, though walking and joking and writing about others who have passed—will inevitably meet her lonely end, too.

In a country where one out of every four people is over the age of sixty-five, and where Ito herself was ninety-one, writing about death should be and is rather matter-of-fact. No need to drape reality in rosy-eyed camouflage. But it’s not the unavoidable fate that unsettles; it’s the number 30,000. Thirty thousand tick marks, one for each person who closes their eyes for the last time entirely alone, each year in Japan. One tally for each person who slept knowing they would not see another person when they reopened their eyes, if they did so at all.

Japan is not alone; the phenomenon of lonely deaths for aging populations echoes in many pockets around the world. One-sixth of Americans, all over age forty-five, suffer a chronic loneliness. 200,000 British senior citizens have not spoken to a friend or relative in more than a month.

A month.

The moon waxes and wanes one full cycle. Another person exhales for the last time, breath caught in throat as though the soul is begging to stay. Thirty sunsets, thirty sunrises, and not a word to a person you might love. Can you imagine the feel of it—the rush of life slipping through your fingertips when this day ends and the next one begins, and you cannot pinpoint a single moment where you felt another person’s love?

“The way we die is a mirror of the way we live,” the aging chairman of a resident council told Onishi. He might’ve shrugged as he referenced the building’s aging residents. Is it that they lived with words left unspoken? Is that separable from living entirely alone?

My grandmother was eight during Partition, which means she was born in 1939, which means she is seventy-nine years old at this time. When I took her history down in university, motivated only by a midterm assigned by an aging Jesuit priest, she had no explanation for what I had read about in textbooks and seen depicted in films. “She didn’t know it happened,” my mother translated during our conference call. “She didn’t even know the British were there.”

The way we die is a mirror of the way we live. Is there something to be mined here, about living life with blinders on? My grandmother’s childhood home is, today, an hour or two by car from the closest town, which means it must have been a far longer trek when she was still there. I stumble upon her childhood accidentally, on pilgrimage to a giant Shiva statue that rises tall in the Gujarat desert. The statue, with its porcelain white skin, is the closest thing to a skyscraper for miles. In all honesty, I find the place of worship gaudy and showy, a gift for tourists far more religious than myself, but I walk barefoot through the mud-packed, white-tiled floor and bend into a kind of upright fetal position to pray.

It is unremarkable until it isn’t, until I grow distracted and take off the blinders, looking side-to-side at the women praying beside me. Until I study the wrinkles of their browning arms and spot these entirely familiar green dots, a diamond pattern, traveling upward like pox from nail beds to neck. Tattoos, the kind a clever nomad might sell under a divine guise. A dot in the crevice of your baby’s chin to protect her from the evil eye. Dots like scales down your legs and feet for long health. Dots down your arms, like chainmail, like armor. Dots like a game: Connect them all, outline the silhouette of your grandmother, crawl inside and find nothing you can understand inside the shape at all.

*

The way we die is a mirror of the way we live. Cycles on cycles, enough that we can trip over ourselves in the attempt to live a better life than the ones that came before.

In 1993, my father is not my father yet. He’s just a man who fears that teaching his child his mother tongue will cause delayed English learning. He worries she will go to school and speak Gujarati instead, or that she will confuse the two for her entire life. He forgets that he learned two languages at the same time, that he was speaking three languages by the time he hit double digits.

When he is finally convinced that his children, with their sponge-like brains and innocent hunger, are more capable than he realizes, he grows more comfortable with his wife leaving Hindi television on in the background of their afternoons. They enroll the children in weekend French classes. Languages become a buffet: Taste one, decide if you’d like more, move on if you’ve found something that smells a little more intriguing. One child manages to forget French and replace it with Spanish; what a luxury, like dropping a glove in the snow and not even feeling the need to pick it up. Like it can be left behind without a single repercussion.

Sigmund Freud’s first book, the least known, sought to understand why we communicate at all by studying aphasia, a language impairment which makes understanding and forming speech difficult. How can people speak on impulse, leaping to conclusions without any prior thought? Why is the verbalization of one’s experience a type of “talking cure”? Through conversations with three patients, Freud grew to understand, academically, the instincts that writers have known for millennia: that individuals need to speak and be heard. That words are chosen with meaning and purpose. That the ability to speak is a cure beyond medicine.

What happens when words are inaccessible, not through a sudden onset of aphasia, but through circumstances beyond one’s control?

I visit my grandmother for the first time in nearly ten years. I show up on her doorstep, a condo in Anaheim where the courtyard is full of families speaking any language but English, where she barely recognizes me. I stumble in grammatically incorrect Gujarati to introduce myself. She looks me once over, pulls me into a hug, and nods that she understands what I have said.

The days pass this way, with her nodding and mumbling quickly in an unidentifiable accent. Each morning, I try just a little bit less, embarrassed not that I do not know her but that somehow I cannot know her. Each morning, to my shame, she tries fewer and fewer unique words, realizing my linguistic age is that of a young child. As we maneuver around one another in the small apartment, we rely on as few words as possible: Making chai? Sit with me. Don’t do work. I’m going to shower. I’ll return before ten. I’m full. I’ll call you.

On any given day, I can imagine her life: a morning shower in a beige-tiled bathroom where the showerhead is attached to its holder with a tight rubber band. Chai without sugar. A roach scurrying across the kitchen floor. Clean dishes placed in the dishwasher for storage. A neighbor who stops by to trade spices or a car ride to the temple in exchange for whatever came in the government-delivered, blue-lidded food jars. Days that blend together—moon waning, moon waxing—days that turn to weeks, that turn to months, that turn to years.

Aphasia, conceptually, linguistically, is a combination of things. First, it is aphatos, the term for speechlessness, a linguistically intriguing but scientifically incorrect way to describe the neurological disorder itself. It feels unfair to say those with true aphasia are somehow rendered speechless. More accurate are the simpler roots, a and phanai. To not speak. Simple. Leave it at that for aphasia as a diagnosis.

But for curiosity’s sake, the linguistic root of phanai, φημί, has a variety of translations. At first, in the dictionary: I think.

And then, I write.

And then, I say yes. I agree. I affirm. I assert.

That is to say, I must speak, meaningfully and with purpose, for speech is a cure beyond medicine.

*

There is a phrase, lifted from T.S. Eliot, that the aging Jesuit priest thought bore repeating throughout every class: “To have the experience and to miss the meaning.”

He would say it slowly, as though through repetition, his gruff musical rumbling would better permeate the minds of tired college seniors. He would say it again, when a student related an experience they had read about to one of their own, using a philosophical term they hadn’t been introduced to before last night’s reading. He would say it while nodding voraciously, appetite quenched, when a student interrupted to say, I just never had the words for this.

That same semester, as English professors planted seeds that grew into saplings, contemplating whether or not the pursuit of crafted language was something I could seriously consider, a feminist moral philosophy professor assigned a paper that made the decision for me. The paper, unlike any other I had ever been told to read, alternated between Spanish and English through the voices of two women academics. And there, in simple font near the top of the second page, was the most important premise: “We can’t separate lives from the accounts given of them; the articulation of our experience is part of our experience.”

They had pinned it down, the feeling I had about wanting to spend my life writing things and yet not being able to explain why: Being able to articulate the meaning is also part of the experience.

When I began this essay, I tried to imagine the loneliest I could be, what it would take to feel the overwhelming anxiety of isolation that came from being unable to communicate effectively. I imagined myself claustrophobic in a defunct spacesuit, no audio tools or microphone, no one else in sight. Just boundless emptiness before me, a single satellite, a thing moving around another thing, alone.

When I began this essay, I told myself it wouldn’t be about my grandmother. It would be about something so much grander: a study of loneliness and wordlessness. The way language of any kind is essential to relationships. It would be about subtle conversations, the way music gets interpreted off the page, or glances are shared across a room. The way my partner touches me beneath the shoulder blade when we walk into a deluge of people I do not know.

Instead, I am enveloped in thoughts of this woman, unable to come up with a thousand words we would have in common to describe a picture of her. Something in my gut gnaws at this. I am guilty for retching at the roach on the floor, for finding her loneliness pitiful, for wishing she had chosen independence rather than finding herself resigned to it.

I ache for her, yearn for a connection to her, and yet we are separated by this judgment, the greatest of oceans. This is always, inevitably, irrevocably, about my grandmother’s inability to return to India and the way language has made it impossible for her to feel at home in America. She steadfastly straddles two countries without any desire to do so. I simultaneously wish I could finagle such a thing. What a luxury.

*

If language is so critical to understanding our own experiences, then it is also tied to memory. Written language, vastly replacing oral histories, is the conduit for increasingly complex social philosophy. It’s difficult to analyze ourselves and our histories (though perhaps for a brilliant and lucky few, not impossible) without a grasp on language. I imagine it is a thousand times more comfortable to relive memories that can be explained in a native tongue than those which could not be.

In The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri writes, “They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.”

My grandmother lives in her memories of Gujarat, where she knew the right word for each item in the kitchen, the beach, the wandering peacock outside. Her ability to name those simple things around her made the retrospective memories that much fonder, that much more nuanced, even if she could not write in her mother tongue. In Anaheim, where everything was in English or Spanish, where the new things didn’t have Gujarati names that she already knew, her memories were devoid of color. She couldn’t even search for the word online. What did it matter, the difference between one vehicle and another, if she couldn’t name it and had no way to try to? Her eyes glazed over the details she could not identify with words.

The things that never should have happened, that were wrong: the move to America. The death of my grandfather. Her abandonment to loneliness. These are the things she talks about, no matter who is around. These are the things she cries to my mother about on the phone. These things endured. I wonder how responsible we are for the dull film of her memories. We: my family, my mother, myself.

According to psychologist Ellen Bialystok, who studies the relationship between bilingualism and Alzheimer’s, the part of our brain that allows us to switch between languages is also the basis of our ability to think in complex ways. “It’s the most important part of your mind,” she says. “It controls attention and everything we think of as uniquely human thought.”

All the work that goes into constantly exercising the brain system and preventing languages from mingling together makes the brain better at coping when things get tough. Just as it can help one weather physical circumstances, it can help your brain weather those circumstances inside of you. The inverse is also true—a 2007 paper by Priska Imberti notes lack of familiarity with the official language of a new country “is a silent source of stress, immobility, depression, and feelings of inadequacy as well as low self-esteem” for immigrants. It leaves memories in black and white. Compounded, lack of familiarity breeds loneliness. Can I place the causality here? Can I avoid any blame?

The way we remember—the color of it all—is a mirror of the way we live.

*

“Does your grandmother like California?” A friend asks me this in the safety of a darkened taxi. I turn the question over in my head. My inability to form a cohesive answer is no exception when it comes to this question.

There are so many like my grandmother. Bee Yang, a Hmong song poet who fled war-torn Laos and came to St. Paul, Minnesota in 1987, worked a string of factory jobs when he came to the US. He has known a certain financial insecurity that plagues elderly immigrants in higher numbers than it does his American-born counterparts—the Census Bureau estimates 16 percent of elderly immigrants live below the poverty line compared to 8 percent of American-born citizens. I knew this number before I read the statistic; it’s designed into my grandmother’s blue-lidded jars. I imagine Bee’s voice is tender, a little shaky, when he says, “My life in America has been lonely. The life here has been difficult.”

When it comes to late-life immigrants like my grandmother, the Population Reference Bureau finds they are more likely to be female, to have low education levels, and to be widowed. In this one thing, my grandmother is not alone.

Does your grandmother like California?

I ask my mother before I go to Anaheim. “I think she wanted to be there, once,” my mother says. “But never alone. She never thought Nana would die before her.”

I ask my grandmother when we are together, my words garbled. I use the verb for “want” instead of “miss”: Do you want Mumbai? Do you want your kids? “I give everything for them,” she answers. I’m not sure if she’s answering the question I asked or the one I meant to. “They grow up and they leave and they fight and they’re just small kids. They don’t know any better.”

It’s critical: She chose California but the choice was inseparable from the dream of growing old without worry or want, her husband beside her. She knew she would mourn the coastline of Juhu Beach. My mother, every time she translates on a conference call between my grandmother and her doctor, or her Social Security contact, asks my grandmother to move in with us. Her response is always the same: A fast no-no-no, accompanied by an unseen shaking of one hand and side-to-side nods of her head.

I think she mourns the people she left behind, who she got used to leaving behind: her village, pre-Partition; her parents, once she married; her daughters, when they married, too. Most importantly, there is her husband, my grandfather, who died of tuberculosis in 2007 in a country where people weren’t supposed to die of tuberculosis, who left her with no one near to understand her language. His death is the reason she resents and yet cannot leave California, where the person she loved the most was last alive and where they, together, had chosen to be. They, two people who otherwise would be immensely alone.

Does your grandmother like California?

Did you know that they created satellites because television signals couldn’t bend to parallel the surface of the earth? Did you know this made phone calls to faraway places almost impossible? We sent a fifteen-hundred kilogram thing to orbit the earth because we could not fathom being unable to communicate over distances

My grandmother has no language that works over short distances. My grandmother spends all her money making phone calls to faraway places. My grandmother is a satellite, a moon, orbiting the ghost of my grandfather, waiting for the day she runs out of fuel and crashlands into the earth.

Does your grandmother like California?

How will I ever know?

*

In a January 2018 essay, Nina Li Coomes wonders how to express how important her grandmother is to her, readying herself to express in Japanese what might be more easily expressed in English.

“To have two tongues is to have two languages of love, two ways to discuss how you treasure a person,” she writes. “I wonder: With my mistranslated voice, how can I tell my baba she is treasured?”

She measures different words, who have no direct counterpart in English but which might bear weight deserving of her grandmother, before finally deciding to write a letter.

I think for a moment of the loveliness of such a gesture, the way written language removes some of the obvious barriers. My accent, which betrays my non-native Gujarati tongue; my hesitance with a word of which I am unsure. I imagine—if I could write in perfect type those square-ish letters, if my grandmother could read them, what wonder might be painted upon her weathered face. But the dream is short-lived: I can barely string together a sentence in written Gujarati, and my grandmother can barely read.

I think of this letter I’ll never write, and I think of how, mere days after I saw her, I purchased an abundance of items in Mumbai. Sand, shells. Chappals made from the earth and fauna of the place. Coffee beans grown in the country’s soil. I wanted to gather them all in my arms and take them with me, to press myself into the dirt of the city until it had no choice but to embrace me. Could I erase the shame of not being able to alleviate my grandmother’s sadness by burying myself in the darkened earth of her city?

A news story tells me of an elderly couple who died of natural causes not all that far from my home in the States, only found when a neighbor realized no one had left the house in weeks. Proof you can be completely together and still utterly alone.

I wonder if my grandmother is alone at this moment, on the other side of the country. I wonder if she was lonely even while I visited her, if my presence only made the oceanic divide between us larger.

In the end, it’s not even about the blue-lidded jars at all. The beans sat in their dusting bags in cabinets until they grew stale, their perfume permeating the cheap cabinet wood. Eventually, I needed the empty space, and I poured the beans from their temporary binds into the gaping beak of the trash bin.

It didn’t matter: Each item I coveted—no, cherished—is an image in a logographic letter I form for my grandmother. Words I want to know for her, carve for her. I bear the reply to every question she has yearned to ask in each item whose name I learn for her. I don’t have to brew the beans; I just have to know their name in her tongue. I cannot let them be forgotten, as I cannot let her be forgotten. Here they are, my subtle and unwritten conversations, my collections of gestures to a woman I cannot reach in as many words.

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