cheesecake and attention.
for mildred and for me.
I’m not sure why we use the word tender only to describe the very young, when the final years of the very longest lives can be the tenderest of all. My cousin Mildred died on Friday, at the enormously tender age of 103.
When it comes to keeping company with miraculously old women, I have been lucky beyond measure. These women were already elderly, or getting there, from the moment that I was born and still they had so much of their lives to live. The hours that I spent as a child, sitting in pilly tights on scratchy rugs, sucking on hard candies and listening to generations of these white and silver-haired women make conversation, with each other, and with me, is a blessing that evades my ability to competently write about it.
In the days since Mildred died, I’ve tried and generally failed to convey what she meant to me. Instead, I’ve opened up my map of New York City family addresses a dozen times at least. I’ve repeatedly clicked open the saved bookmarks of my uncle’s ancestry charts to follow the links of who was connected to whom and how, who was born when and where. I’ve pored over photographs.
They’re a funny kind of comfort, these bits and pieces of recorded history. They help make sense of the lives that in one roundabout way or another led to my own. They offer a glimpse into the particular, and sometimes peculiar, ways people from different corners of the world can come together in the same crowded city to make a family. But the record is troubling, too. There’s so much that’s left out. Whole lives are reduced to a dozen addresses on a map, an accolade recorded on paper, a certificate or two, dates of intersecting lives beginning and ending, relationships defined by the branches filled in on a family tree. Mildred was my grandmother’s first cousin, and without any children of her own, but in all of the ways that really count, more of a grandmother to me than my own.