ARISTOTELOUS 6, TEN YEARS AGO

On 1 April 1981, ten years ago, my grandmother died. I was thirty. She was born in 1905, and diabetes and Parkinson’s disease had been her chief afflictions for the last thirty years: not ignoble diseases, like cancer, but by no means negligible either. She fought back stubbornly, not out of any desire for heroics but because she needed to live. She very rarely let herself go, and then only briefly, after some emotional blow. In her last two years she started having strokes, which became more frequent towards the end, though fortunately they were not the calvary they might have been. She went to hospital several times in that final period; the last time, she never came home. Once or twice I went with her myself in the ambulance, a distressing experience; the end was in sight by then. Capitulation palpably before me, I found myself thinking about it for the first time, imagining scenarios starring myself as the hero of old age. Grief and preoccupation warred constantly with everyday concerns and the natural optimism of a thirty-year-old.