“I eat up, the hundred feelings vanish,
sip wine, ten thousand worries end,
and knowing we're all ravaged by age,
I've grown old without all that worry.”
~ Po Chü-I
My maternal grandmother recently moved to Calgary, making this the first time in her 90 years to call our fair city “home”. Covid-19 restrictions disallow me from entering her care facility, so when I paid her my inaugural visit this past weekend I waited out front for her to come down. As she emerged, an ambulance pulled up and two paramedics calmly rolled a stretcher into the building.
“We've had a death,” grandma informed me. “At least I think that's what the guy at the desk said". I commented on the sadness of the situation, thinking to myself that it couldn't be a particularly infrequent occurrence here. And do they send ambulances for corpses? Maybe all the hearses were busy.
We sat down in the courtyard, inhaling lilacs and honeysuckle. I couldn’t remember the last time that we’d been alone together. For at least the past dozen years our visits have included other family members, and prior to then my grandfather would have been omnipresent. She lucidly discussed the tribulations of old age, describing it as the great unfairness of life. It must be all the more difficult when the mind is sharp enough to recognize one's irreparably declining physical state.
Grandma asked me about the impossibility of travel during the pandemic, and I lamented the encumbrances, both professional and emotional—gripes that are by no means unique to me. She fondly reminisced about the trips to China that her and my grandfather had made before his passing, noting how much they had meant to him. She’s the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and I chose not to regale her with my theory that her inamorato had been a near-enlightened Buddhist trapped in a hardworking German-Canadian's body. We let the conversation breathe in order to fondly remember him, each in our own ways. I often wonder what he'd think of my obsession with German wine, not to mention my recent fascination with ancient Chinese poetry.
When grandma tried to continue the conversation in German, I sheepishly confessed that my bullshit grasp of that language had deteriorated even further since I'd last seen her. She teased me about it, and partly in German. Just then, the paramedics calmly exited the building, their stretcher carrying an upright and alert elderly woman. Grandma stared in disbelief.
“Well that person isn't dead!” she exclaimed, perhaps a little too loudly.
“Good thing we didn't send flowers,” I replied.
Lunch was announced and it was time for me to say goodbye. I'm not sure if my visit was the highlight of my grandmother's day (perhaps that depended on what they served for lunch), but it was certainly the highlight of mine. I went home and opened a bottle of Oberhäuser Riesling—a dialect of German that I intuit with the fluency of filiation—and lost myself in sentimental reverie.
