Say It While You Still Can

TL;DR Better out than in. Be bold. Tell people you love them while you still can. No regrets. 💌 ✍️

Dear Wonderful Readers,

My grandmother is not getting out of bed. I can't help but think of what she's leaving behind: the things, the people, and the world outside her room. She spent all of COVID alone in her apartment on the second floor of a crumbling stucco building in Koreatown, Los Angeles. She was happy living there until she had to be taken to hospital when she fell over and broke her pelvis two years ago. She hasn't stood up unassisted since. When she moved, my aunt came and packed up everything that she owned and put it in a storage unit.

When I tell people my grandmother lives in Los Angeles, it sounds incredibly glamorous. Their eyes open wide. But they don’t know that she misplaced her divorce settlement money in the 80s on a hotel in Palm Springs. Then she didn’t want to look after Aunt Mildred, which at least would have left her with the three-story house in the Castro, San Francisco—a house that her granddaughter, paying astronomical rent in the same city some fifteen years later, would quite like to have had.

Share this with a fellow millennial who pays astronomical rent:

Still, I love my grandmother. She balks at the MAGA, conspiracy-theory-inclined, insecure man in my family and our circles. She pesters them, expecting better. She calls me up to remind me that I should subscribe to Heather Cox Richardson, the esteemed historian from Harvard. She listens to my podcast. She says I have a talent for interviewing people. She tells me of the love she feels towards one of the carers at her nursing home, blurring tender affection with attraction. I read between the lines.

My grandmother tells me getting old sucks. Half the time she calls me, it’s because she can't figure out how to do something on her iPad. The other half of the times she calls me, it’s to remind me of the things she has selected for me to have after she dies, the few treasures amongst the multiple boxes of rotten, rat, pee-and-poop-infested books that I’ve already hauled out of her storage unit on Pico.

That freaking storage unit. It's like a hospital for people’s dying memories of their old selves. Yet, unlike bodies, which you can put in the ground, you can’t get rid of the things in there. There’s too much “value”. Nostalgiafied, imagined value. These embodied artifacts of your soul make it impossible for any future person to get rid of them.

I've already siphoned off the treasures I wanted as payment for my time cleaning out the crap. The two ceramic Mexican masks and the two pieces of Huichol (Wixárika) felt art that I found in a trunk. A trunk that was buried deep in the bowels of my grandmother’s storage unit and which, I kid you not, also contained her mother’s, my great grandmother's, ashes. Thankfully, the soul of my great-grandmother has since been laid to rest. Her ashes scattered by my sister, my great-aunt, and my cousin at Stinson Beach.

My grandmother tells me she wants to walk, but she always said that exercising hurt her. One time, I dragged her, rushing, from Southwark tube station in London to the Tate Modern to see a Lichtenstein exhibition, which I didn’t even like. That was the closest I ever saw her to running; for a timed entry to a museum, which we simply could not miss.

My grandmother might never run again, or maybe even stand up unassisted again, but her saving grace is that she can still make art. My grandmother has painted all her life and recently started doing art again in her nursing home, even though she struggles to see and move her hands. I am glad for her, finally having fun and challenging her inner perfectionist. But she told me most of what she