Saying Goodbye

I went to visit my grandmother – “Bubbe” as I call her (and as they call grandmothers in the Jewish tradition) this past weekend. She is not terminally ill or imminently dying, but the visit felt like the beginning of a very long goodbye. She has been suffering from dementia, and after sustaining a fall just a few short weeks ago, she has rapidly declined due to the associated trauma.

I had gone to go see her right after that fall. She was bent out of shape and physically in a lot of pain. So much so that when she saw me, she asked me to leave.

“I don’t want him to remember me like this!” she exclaimed to my mother.

It was hard for me to watch. I had left the room for a moment and all I could hear was screaming while nurses tried to assist her as I waited outside in the lobby with my parents, trying to muster up some sort of conversation. At least then she still had the wherewithal to know who I was, enough so that she wanted to protect me from seeing her in her deteriorating state.

“I should probably go home, because she doesn’t want me to see her like this,” I lied to my parents. I needed to go outside to have a cry.

My grandmother is the matriarch of our family. When I think of her, it brings me back to a different time and place: my childhood. I associated seeing my grandmother with seeing all of my family. Indeed, she hosted the major Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Passover. This was the one time I would see all my uncles and aunts and cousins gathered around the same table. I was the youngest, so my grandfather would whisper in my ear where he had hidden the afikomen. In the Jewish tradition, the children attempt to find a piece of Matzah that is hidden in the house. 

I was a big fan of her recipes. She made Matzo Ball soup and beef brisket to die for. As I got older, she would give me frozen extras that I could eat at home. Because I was a big fan of pickles as a kid, she always made sure that there were extra pickles on every occasion – “for Jeffrey.”

She is a typical Jewish grandmother. By this, I mean that she certainly loves to brag about her grandchildren. It was oftentimes a little embarrassing being with her somewhere when a friend might pass by. She would go out of her way to make sure she introduced me so she could make the other person aware that her grandson had come to visit her. And she almost always needed to let the person know I went to Princeton.

The same was true for my older brother. For every accomplishment I have, it seems like he has ten. He has written New York Times bestselling books and has appeared on mainstream media channels as part of his journalism career. Bragging about his many accomplishments to her friends would invariably lead her to say this about me: “Jeffrey is no slouch, either.” I decided to lean into my status as “not a slouch” in comparison to my overachieving older brother and bought her a birthday gift one year – a mousepad that was a photo of the two of us with the text “Jeffrey is no slouch.”

My grandparents and I always had a special relationship. Sometimes I would go and stay with them. Even as a teenager, I often flew down to Florida during the winter to stay with them as well as my uncle and aunt. I imagine most teenagers do not go out of their way to spend a week in a senior living community with their grandparents. I did, and I never thought twice about it.

When I went on those trips, I remarked how much she loved me and my cousins. I have three younger cousins who lived in Florida at the time. My grandmother used to babysit for them every weekend as they lived so close to one another. There has never been anything more important to her than her family. 

As everyone got older, people moved apart and some relationships deteriorated. It would be very rare for the entire family to be in the same room again. These relics from my childhood felt like exactly that – relics, moments to be remembered but never to be felt again.

Bubbe was always an outspoken person and she never shied away from giving her opinion. She would always tell you about what new show she was watching or whatever person she thought was being a “shmuck.” However, if there is one lesson she imparted on everyone, I have to admit that it is not so cheery.

“Anti-semitism is alive and well,” she would always say.

For many years, we laughed at her. Indeed, for most of my life, I had never really experienced anti-Semitism. There was a time in middle school when a classmate threw a penny on the floor and asked me if I was going to pick it up in front of all my friends. In high school, there was a trio of classmates who often picked on me for being Jewish, and it is really only in hindsight that I’ve come to realize how hateful and abusive they were. But the idea that there was this invisible force around me that was out to get me felt like a little bit much. I’ll talk more about this later.

I remember moving on to college and dealing with a unique situation. For graduation ceremonies, each student was given three tickets: two for their parents, and one more for a sibling, friend, or relative. This created a black market of sorts for graduation tickets, as some students did not need all of their tickets and others needed to procure extras to accommodate their larger families. My family is not large, but it was some sort of foregone conclusion that my grandparents would be at my graduation ceremony. This made me a proverbial buyer in the graduation ticket black market. Surely enough, they came down for the entire weekend and we took plenty of photos together. In some ways, when you grow up with a cheerleader who is always singing your praises and bragging about you to their friends, you take it for granted that someday they might not be around any more.

Some years after college, my grandfather died. It had all happened rather suddenly after a fall he sustained. I had regretted not leaving New York City one night as he was declining because my mother called me while I was on a date to tell me that he had died. It had been my intention to go and visit the following morning. I was mad at myself for waiting the extra day.

Bubbe was devastated when this happened. They had been married for over sixty years. I still remember the soldier handing her the flag at the funeral while she was crying. She was going to have to adjust to a new way of life. For the ensuing years – and still today – my mother has been chiefly responsible for helping my grandmother with all of her affairs: groceries, doctor visits, shopping, figuring out how to use her iPhone, and so on. Some days she would receive over 50 phone calls from her. It was a large burden to bear. So I resolved to be intentional about visiting her.

A few years later, COVID struck. This forced her into isolation. Overall, it was a terrible time for her. But one nice thing that came out of it was that my wife and I along with my brother and his husband and my parents would FaceTime my grandmother every weekend. Our weekly chats were something to look forward to. In some ways, she was a caricature of herself, at one point in time comparing herself to Anne Frank since she was an old Jewish lady locked in a room. I would repeatedly remind her that she had it a lot better than Anne Frank did. By now, she was starting to repeat herself about some of the favorite shows she was watching or some favorite memory of hers, or the usual “anti-Semitism is alive and well” comment and we would all make fun of her for that in unison.

Sometime when the dust was settling on COVID, we all went to visit her. At this time she was in an assisted-living facility. I had taken some fascination with Ancestry.com and was trying to piece together my lineage. I asked her some questions about her parents and grandparents and where they came from. At one point, she stopped to tell me about her cousins who had been murdered in the Holocaust. She had been writing letters to them in Europe from the United States, and one day, the letters stopped coming back.

She came to my wedding two years ago. She was teary-eyed through all of it and quite happy. By this time, it was a real chore to plan around getting her to and from every part of the event, and quite literally something we had to plan around. But it went well. She would talk about the wedding every single time I saw her ever since. I’m not sure if she forgot she was bringing it up all the time, but it was definitely one of her go-to conversation pieces to remind me “What a wonderful wedding that was.”

October 7th, 2023. I never spoke to her about what happened in Israel. By this time, her short term memory had really faded. I still was coming to visit once a month or so, and we would cycle through the same topic five or six times during a thirty minute stay. I thought to myself that perhaps it was fortunate her memory was starting to fade away because she would be awfully disappointed to see what the world had come with regards to its attitudes towards Jewish people.

Yes, that is the pervasive thought I am left with as I watch her decline: she was right all along. This lesson she was trying to teach me about the world’s oldest hatred was something real after all. The last 14 months have been nothing if not incredibly painful and hurtful. I am not even a religious Jew, and yet seeing people celebrating in the deaths of Jews and otherwise justifying hatred towards them has been disconcerting at a minimum. Never have I felt more alone over this period of time, and never have I regretted poking fun at anyone more than I do making fun of Bubbe all those years for her sage warning.

Nevertheless, she got to meet our granddaughter Josephine a couple months after she was born. Incidentally, this was also only a few months after October 7th. Finally there was some light to the darkness. I took Josie to my parents’ house and captured a video of my grandmother’s reaction, overwhelmed with joy and tears as she met her great-granddaughter for the first time. We took a photo: her, my mother, me, and Josie – four generations in one image.

Just five months later, I remember taking Josie to visit Bubbe. Her quality of life had diminished but she still knew who we were and could have a conversation. Josie started banging the table in front of us with excitement and Bubbe laughed uncontrollably. I thought to myself that maybe this was a small, good thing I could do for her in her waning moments, and vowed to do the best job I could to maintain some semblance of regular visits.

This past weekend was difficult. I had received a message from my mother earlier in the week emphasizing that things had really gone downhill and that I may want to come visit soon. It was hard to tell what to make of that. My mother had been saying similar such things for a long time, which I think was largely due to the fact that she had been seeing Bubbe so frequently. For her, the changes were more noticeable than they were to others. It could sometimes create the effect of feeling that my mother was more sensitive to these changes. But I had already heard stories about how she was forgetting people close to her, and I knew there was some urgency.

My wife and I took Josie to go see Bubbe this past Saturday. At first I did not know if I would go in first because I did not want Josie to see me upset. I decided we should all go in together. And even from outside the room seeing my grandmother sitting in a wheelchair and staring into space, I knew that she was a shell of her former vibrant self.

She seemed half-asleep for the beginning of our interaction, not even aware that she had three new visitors alongside my mother. Eventually, she was able to open her eyes and see me and she smiled. She was having a hard time interacting and in a very tired demeanor would pivot between half-sentences and nothing at all.

We took her back to her room and Josie started to enjoy herself running around the room and screaming excitedly.

“Is that the baby?” Bubbe asked.

At this point, she can barely see any more. I was grateful she could still recognize me. In fact, she found it somewhere within herself to make a typical Jewish grandmother type of compliment:

“I think he gets more handsome every time.”

At one point, seemingly for no particular reason at all, she just asked out of the blue, “Can I hold the baby?”

For me, in this moment, time stood still. I think time stood still because I realized the flame was still burning in there. And it felt to me like she had some awareness of her own condition, and that holding the baby might be her way of holding on to the future. At least that is what I like to believe. She had never asked in any of the other visits before.

So we propped Josie up onto her lap. We took one more photo of the four of us – four generations, just like the first one. At one point, Josie reached out to hold her hand and Bubbe smiled.

Was this the last positive memory she will have of me? Was this the last positive memory I will have of her? That is what I am left thinking. I thought of writing this as a letter directly to her, but it’s far too late for the words to have their intended impact.

So maybe the impact can be for others. Our lives are made of small moments like these ones. Cherish them. They are fleeting even in our own minds.