At 95, My Grandmother Is My Mirror – and I Don’t Know How to Feel About It

On resilience, ableism, and a life worth living

My grandmother Rosine, in her 90s, enjoying her balcony

I can’t think of a single conversation with my grandmother that hasn’t involved comparing to-do lists.

Doing, after all, is the antidote to our anxiety, the evidence of our resilience. I grew up witnessing this and absorbing it into my pores as fact. Doing is a quiet defiance that pulses through my bloodstream.

Because doing is mostly what Neni and I chat about, I’ve needed extra motivation to call her lately. I dial her number and clear my throat over the rings to pep up my voice, to mask the grief that has blown my productivity to pieces.

Neni doesn’t know anything about the stillborn boy I’ve been mourning since our surrogate lost him last Christmas, or the late miscarriage we had months later with our second surrogate. I haven’t told her that I’m haunted day and night by the neglect from our fertility clinic and the egregious mishandling of our funds by the surrogacy agency. I want to tell her I can barely breathe, that every effort is a colossal one, that I only want to clean and purge and garden.

But I don’t let on.

I don’t need to fuel the shame I feel for squandering her sacrifices and limbing our family tree.

And what’s my grief compared to hers, anyway? At 95, she’s outlasted her husband, her siblings, and nearly everyone she’s known. She’s left behind a country, a language she once spoke fluently, and a craft her hands can no longer do. She’s been a widow for longer than she was married. I can’t possibly pile my grief onto hers.

“I did a lot yesterday,” she confesses during one of our evening calls. “Today, I kept wanting to lie down.” She sounds defeated, yet something tells me she didn’t let herself nap.

My grandmother’s days have forever been segmented into pushing herself and paying for it. Resilience has been the cornerstone of our family’s narrative for generations. Displaced from their native villages in Armenia, my ancestors made a life for themselves in Egypt until the climate there, too, became oppressive for Christians. When my mom was 10, my grandparents traded the desert for knee-deep snow. All they brought to Canada was a single wooden crate and a fierce work ethic that allowed them to provide for all the family members who gradually sought refuge around their table. Success meant enduring, thrusting pain under the rug to get by, to belong.

Even now, at 95, my grandmother sees no other valid way to live.

She plows through a roster of self-imposed tasks as though her life depends on the state of her pantry and paperwork—and I think maybe it does.

Neni still does her word searches and her banking in her third language. She speaks up at condo board meetings and fights for her rights when she’s overcharged a dollar and obsesses about shredding documents to reduce clutter. She converts each calendar square into a diary entry in her meticulously printed Armenian script that my brain sadly struggles to read. She’s more up to date on the news than I am. She surprises me with entrepreneurial advice on raising my prices and seeking new clients and finding clever ways to tie my older products into new collections. She tells everyone she’ll meet that I have a doctorate and insists that I remind people (and myself), too.

Whenever I visit Neni, it goes like this: We gravitate to the kitchen table, even if it’s not meal time, even if I say I’m not hungry. Her role is to nourish, mine is to eat. Once she’s dotted the tablecloth with dishes and cookie tins, she lowers herself into her rattan chair, grimacing as she grips its armrests. But she’ll spring from her chair almost as soon as she sits, propelled by an urgent need to tap on a painting’s bottom right corner to level it, or lower the shades to shield her Egyptian rug from the sun, or rotate the pot cradling the newest offshoot she’s coaxed into becoming a whole new plant. Watching her confirms it: my restlessness has a source.

For Neni, rest is laziness, even if it’s earned.

It’s not enough of a badge of honor to be living autonomously in the condo she bought as a widow 40 years ago—a condo that was used as the sales office until she demanded it be sold to her because she loved the way the sun caressed each room. Her value lies in keeping it immaculate, in thwarting its aging along with her own. Her broom, like her coats, is wrapped in protective plastic. Everything occupies its permanent place. Once a month, she calls a cleaning person to help, but her pathological perfectionism has her following this stranger from room to room to train them to clean to her standards. She even cleans before they arrive, as she would for a dinner guest, then prompts them for praise on how pristine her home is.

Her look-what-I-managed-to-dos astound me. She’ll climb a rickety chair to dust her chandelier or to silence her smoke detector when she broils her garlic eggplant. She’ll scrub the floor on her bony knees and fix the geraniums on her balcony each time the squirrel makes a mess of the soil. She’ll make her bed every morning, leaving not a single crease in the satin comforter and no pillow even slightly askew, no matter how badly she slept and how much pain her bones are in. She’ll take a cab to the mall for errands she only needs to run because she’s always run them. She gets her hair and nails done before brunch at the community center where she loves making people try to guess her age.

When she’s done doing all she does, she crashes into the cumulated fatigue that’s shadowed her for decades.

I grew up being fed this lie: that there’s no increment between all and nothing. Now, carrying my own decades of chronic illness and chronic grief, I’ve been struggling to override my programming.

First, it was my body that had to unlearn the myth of endlessly enduring. This obligatory grit is so entrenched in my perception of success that it still feels like a failure each time I’m trapped in limbo between want and can. I shouldn’t be able to relate to Neni’s aging body—to see myself in her curved spine, aching hips, backed-up bowels, and seized fascia—except that mine has aged before its time.

Like Neni, I had a hysterectomy by 40. Like her, the anemia that’s weighed me down since my teens has more to do with marrow than menstruation. I’ve had to learn to sit with the discomfort of forced pacing, of resting, of quitting. I’ve had to process the (self-)judgment that comes with saying no to safeguard my wellness—no to the round-the-clock sacrifices of a career in academia, no to the rabbit hole of IVF, no to hauling a sick uterus “just in case” I might need it someday.

Now, it’s my brain that’s desperate to return to its “before”. My therapist urges me to be patient and accepting of the holes that PTSD has left in my brain, like a piece of Swiss cheese. “The holes will fill, and you’ll get your brain back,” she promises, but I can’t be sure. Have I ever gotten back anything I’ve lost?

I accomplish a fraction of what I’m used to accomplishing. The words I land on don’t feel right, while I fumble in my fog for the ones that stay just slightly - maddeningly - out of reach. Things I did and wrote a few months ago seem foreign to my memory. There’s an ocean inside me even if I don’t drink, even if I don’t move. The few hours of sharpness I muster are devoted to writing complaint letters and legal claims and pitches to magazines, none of which may become anything. I try to see them all as an investment in my future, a tiny act of hope. I spend most of my seasons grounding myself in nature or traveling to shake myself free of my shadow. I tell myself constantly, all day long, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. This is me surviving. Success is steadying the helm. Look what I managed to do, I whisper, fighting to ignore the voice that shouts over it: it’s not enough.

Maybe resilience is strategic surrender.

At 95, Neni still has a hard time surrendering. She complains constantly that she’s not like before, that her changes in sleep, appetite, and energy are driving her crazy. Failure, to her, is a pantry devoid of freshly baked goods and a mattress that isn’t flipped monthly. She refuses to let us install a grab bar in her tub because it’ll spoil her ceramics. She insists on putting away all her dishes (high up in her cupboards, no less) instead of leaving them accessible in her drying rack.

She clings to her rituals while I question mine, and I wonder: who is more at peace?

It’s hard to reconcile that what I admire about her is exactly what makes me roll my eyes. I’m mad at her for pushing too hard, for neglecting her fragility, for being so hung up on how she used to be and refusing to adapt to how she is now. But why can I roll my eyes at her, yet not at myself? Do I have to get to 95 to earn a free pass?

As I watch Neni, I get to know my self-inflicted ableism much more intimately, like sitting face to face with it at dinner, understanding where it comes from and how it may be safely dismantled. Painfully, though, every ritual I postpone or discard is another layer of my identity that I shed, a palmful of roots that confirm I belong.

Though I can’t imagine making it to 95, I wonder if I’m destined to Neni’s way of living. It’s almost as if I can train myself to think differently but the obsessive instinct is still there—the design is cemented beneath the temporary override.

I hate that it’s never clear what heals and what hinders.

Neni and me, on my balcony

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