Fragile, mighty hands: bittersweet reflections on caring for my grandmother

This poignant essay was written by Caregiving Advice team member, Eliza Brown.

The wrinkles and veins that map my grandmother’s hands are the rings of a mighty oak tree. I’d run my dimpled fingers alongside them as a child and she’d laugh, saying in her sweet southern twang, “My hands have always been skinny. Bony and veiny. Your hands are smooth and soft like a lady’s should be.” Now I run my hand along hers as we drink our morning coffee, and she asks me if it’s bedtime, looking intently at me as to figure out just who I am. “Not bedtime yet. It’s still morning,” I assure her, as I give her hand another squeeze.

It is easy to take for granted — and even to overlook — the lifetime I’ve been blessed to share with my grandmother. My parents’ relationships with their grandparents seem, from my perspective, to have been loving in a respectfully distant, polite manner: a stereotypical relationship between generations. This is vastly different — not better and not worse, simply different — from my relationship with my 96-year-old grandmother, whom I call AJ.

At times I long to have a grandmother/granddaughter relationship again with AJ. I wish I could drive over to her house these days and that she’d put the tea on and slice up an orange, and I could sit at her table and share a new secret with her amidst the fragrant steam and citrus spritzes, and watch the fine lines on her face change as she listens to me speak. I long to dry dishes as she washes, and laugh when she leaves suds on the bottoms of plates. That is how I imagine my stereotypical grandmother/granddaughter relationship would look.

But then I look at what I have now that my parents never had the privilege of knowing. There’s a certain beauty that accompanies choosing what outfit AJ will wear, then tugging the right shirt over her head, paired with a sweater that I know she will like because it sparkles; bringing a few pieces of jewelry over to her lap for her to choose which looks best with what she is wearing; holding up her perfume bottle close to her face so she can see it, and watching her squeezing her eyes shut as I spray it on her.

These are the intimate, in-between, mortar moments of her day that I would never get to witness if I only visited for a cup of tea. These are the moments that make her so spectacular — her sassiness when the clothes I pick don’t match or need to be ironed (something I’ve never been very good at paying attention to), her giggle when I tickle her toes before putting her socks on, the way she inspects each brooch, each necklace, each gem-studded bracelet and ever-so-slowly adorns herself with them.

I watch with glittering eyes as AJ sips her coffee. I rub my thumb along her fragile, mighty hands, give the tip of her nose a kiss for every time I lost my patience with her so far this morning, and thank God for the mortar moments that I would never get the chance to witness if my role in AJ’s life were any different.