Don't forget me

I was brushing my hair when I first caught a bright grey strand reflecting differently from the brown and red I have always had. There are more of them now, clustered and shimmering. There are also lines between my brows from a lifetime of furrowing, which I do often.

I won't lie and tell you I feel beautiful every day. I live in 2026, I have a phone, I pay attention. I know the pull toward fixing, wishing (or lasering or injecting) certain things away. I have felt it. I have also learned, slowly and not without help, to stay with my own body's small changes longer than that first uncomfortable moment of resistance. There is more there. First and prominently, grief (its own topic for other days), and then, eventually, awe and wonder at the passage of time made suddenly tangible in my own body.

I find the same awe comes a little easier when I look at my partner. He has patches of grey by his ears and in his beard, scattered through his hair in a way that gives him dimension and weight, and I love them. Time is moving through him too, and I find it gorgeous. I am trying to look in the mirror the same way I look at him. I had a teacher in that way of looking.

My Nonna was from Sardinia. She left small town life because she wanted something better and was not a woman who waited around for permission. She married a Holocaust survivor. She raised seven children across two continents. Somewhere in the middle of everything, she decided her family was moving to America because she said so. She was not gentle or necessarily nice, not interested in softening anything for anyone. She was fiercely loving, with the emphasis on fierce, and she was beautiful. She was always dressed in gorgeous flowing clothes with her hair done, her home full of curated art and furniture, fresh flowers and fruit from her garden on the the table. Her story merits volumes more that I don't have space to write here. I think of her whenever I see roses (which is often, now that I’m in Rose City). She was a spectacular and beautiful matriarch.

In her later years, dementia took a lot of what she knew, including who I was. She was living in a memory care center when I brought my partner to meet her one afternoon. My dad came too; he brought nail polish because she loved to have her nails done. In my memory, she was wearing a pink short-sleeved dress. While I knew the staff had picked it out for practical reasons, it still looked exactly like her effortless classic style. Her hair had grown out past her shoulders, long and dark silver and soft. She relaxed as we painted her nails and brushed her hair. Her hands felt smaller and more delicate than ever in mine. They were still somehow daunting, even then. She smiled at my partner for the entire visit. She did not know my name that day. But she knew she was beautiful, and she knew there was a beautiful man with beautiful grey hair sitting across from her, and she was not going to waste the opportunity. When we stood up to leave, she reached out to hold his hand.

"Don't forget me," she said.

It was the funniest moment. It was also beautiful. Something dementia could not reach was her sense of her own beauty and her ability to recognize it in someone else. That ran so deep in her it outlasted almost everything else. It was not about perfection or eternal youth. She maintained a deeper and more beautiful connective presence than anything one can get in front of a camera or mirror.

I think about her when I catch myself wishing something away in the mirror, or when I hear someone apologize for the ordinary evidence of being alive in a body. I have done both. I know how easy it is to learn contempt for the realest thing you have. She would not have had patience for it. She came too far and worked too hard and lived too fully. I am learning to follow suit.

I wish we could all look at ourselves and the people we love and see the silver strands and the wrinkles and the life-changed hands for the incredible, essential, beautiful things they are.

I saw it in my Nonna. I will not forget her.

P.S.

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What I’m reading: The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan