92 years ago, my grandmother made a best friend on the Lower East Side. They remained great friends until my grandmother died about ten years ago.
I was never close with my grandmother, who spent all the years that I knew her caring first for her ailing husband and then for her ailing sister and was left with little energy to devote to her grandkids.
But when A and I moved to Brooklyn ten years ago, we were right down the street from her friend. This woman was never able to have children, though she is close with her sister’s children. We started to visit, and she became, in many ways, like a grandmother to me.
She is in amazing shape. She lives in the same apartment she’s been in for forty years and it has only been for the last couple of years that she’s had someone live there with her, though it is far from round-the-clock care. (The person has never been there when we visit on weekends, for instance.) Her only limitations are that she needs a walker and a hearing aid. She is 110% mentally present, still reads the NY Times every day, and still has strong political opinions. She was an active Commie back in the day, even going on several state tours of the U.S.S.R., and the only fight she and my grandmother ever had was over Communism.
Last weekend, along with family and friends from across the generations (and even the borough president, who dropped by and gave a speech), I had the privilege of attending her 100th birthday party. It is mind-boggling to contemplate all the change that she has seen in a century, through two world wars, the Depression, the rise and fall of Communism, the popularization of cars, the invention of television, computers, and a front-row view from her balcony just across the river of 9/11.
She has also lived through the loss of her entire generation of family and friends– everyone she knew and was once close with– and has effectively been old for three decades. It’s weird to contemplate. People in my family do not tend to live nearly that long, and I’m not entirely sure whether it’s a blessing or a curse. I know, however, that if my grandmother’s friend hadn’t lived this long, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to get to know her, and that my life would have been immeasurably poorer for the loss.
