Moments with grandma

One gloomy Wednesday morning I was on my bed, a blanket wrapped around me, reading a book. I was just about to doze off when my 76-year-old grandmother came staring down at her hands.

“Can you clip my nails; they have been bothering me so much,” she said. I got up lazily, fished out a nail clipper from a messy bedside drawer and took my grandmother to the living room, the only room where windows seemed to have let enough light on that overcast day.

My grandmother sat on the sofa and I settled myself on the floor near her feet. As I held her trembling hands, I realised that my nails were three times longer than hers – but still too short to my liking.

“Don’t hurt me with your nails when you clip mine,” she murmured. This very sentence reminded me of my final “grandfather- granddaughter” moment and my eyes welled up with tears.

My whole family had been on the terrace on a bright sunny weekend during the month of Poush two years ago. We were not in our brightest moods though. My grandfather had been diagnosed of skin cancer about a month earlier. I could tell that he had been losing weight and getting weaker. But my grandfather wasn’t the kind who gave up so soon.

“Will you clip my nails?” he had asked me gently, lifting up his hands which were trembling more than ever. “Of course,” I said, grabbing his hands. As I worked on his nails in the gentlest way possible to avoid hurting him, he had said: “Don’t hurt me with your nails when you clip mine. Yours need trimming more than mine.”

“I won’t,” I said, passing a playful glance at my father who shared a similar distaste for my nails.

“Perfect,” said my grandmother, bringing me back from the memory lanes. Her nails were done. I looked up at her weather-beaten face. “Perfect,” she said again as she smiled at me. I smiled back and my eyes moved towards my grandfather’s picture on the wall. He had passed two weeks after that weekend.

I again looked back at my grandmother. She was still smiling. She had lost the companion of her life that day after years of togetherness.

Something sunk into me that moment. People leave – sometimes because they want to and sometimes they have to. You can either decide to move on, letting their memories be your strength or you can let yourself drown into misery.