Just before my maternal grandmother died at the age of 95, I kissed her cheek and thanked her for her wisdom.
I had carried one particular odd piece of advice with me all of my life. It had been on Independence Day, when I was nine or ten years old, that she whispered an odd warning, borne of a distant Russian wisdom, which ruled and guided my life for the next four decades.
Now, at 95, she was far from the poetic woman of my youth.
She lived under the delusion that she was in a Miami hotelShe had used lipstick as a rouge to color her pale face, and was quite a shock to behold when I turned the corner on the seventh floor of her retirement home.
She asked with childlike innocence if I could bring her new makeup and big diamond jewelry for her to wear.
Cautiously, I asked her, "What type of diamond jewelry?" She responded, "Expensive, fancy jewelry."
She lived under the delusion that she was in a Miami hotel, one that slouched on basic standards. "The meals at this hotel are terrible, but what is a person to do?"
She didn’t realize she was in a nursing home near the beach in Coney Island, Brooklyn.
Now that she’d reached advanced age, death looming, I wanted her to know that I loved her, how her advice had molded me.
As a child, I cherished ideas, and a few philosophers touched my early soul.
Dr. Seuss competed with Grandma.
He once wrote, "Be who you are and say what you think, because those who matter don't mind, and those who mind, don't matter!"
My other favorite philosopher was sitting in a wheelchair, arms propped with a pillow and an alarm that would alert nurses if she pitched forward and left her chair's fixed position.
She was different the next time I saw her, the way she used to be.
"Hello, Paul! Sharp as a matzah and twice as crummy!"
"How come you don't call your grandma more often? Humph!"
"Humph! You going to wait until I'm in the cemetery and then you'll visit me?"
"I'm sorry that you'll be sorry, but then it'll be too late!"
Her words always riddled me with guilt, though I never let her knowThis was the same greeting I had gotten from her over the years of telephone conversation. Her words always riddled me with guilt, though I never let her know. But I saw it as rather a good sign that she was still feisty.
I quickly tried to change the subject. "Grandma, I remember sitting with you on the Brighton Beach boardwalk – just out this window – when I was about nine years old. I still remember the good advice you gave me back then."
"What advice did I give you?"
I told her, "The whole family was celebrating the 4th of July, happy to be together. You whispered in my ear, ‘Don't get too close to people; you'll catch their dreams.’”
"What?" she said.
I repeated, "Don't get too close to people; you'll catch their dreams."
"Oy!" she said. "I am very sorry if I ever told you that."
I reminded her of what an impact her words had on me. “Your advice stayed with me, both as a philosophy and in its poeticism.”
Her words had allowed me to remain aloof and separate from everyone, as a type of self-protection, to preserve my own dream.
She looked at me as though I were some stranger in a dream.
"I never told you that."
She paused.
That wrong belief had overshadowed every relationship in my life "Germs," she said. "I said you'll catch their germs. That’s the advice I always gave you."
That wrong belief had overshadowed every relationship in my life with ambivalence and a craving to be left alone.
If one was alone, one was safe from what people could do to you, I had reasoned.
Two marriages and a dozen influenza's later, I had realized her truth too late.
