Sidi-not so saintlY

I see her life and death hang in the balance, telling me she is not dead, but not alive enough to know what life is.

When the person I knew is no longer the person who is alive, and the alive is merely a thin veil concealing all that is already dead.

I often talk about my grandmother in my everyday life, reference her in my childhood scenarios, and liken her to my siblings when I see her annoying traits in them. I often recount her anecdotes; she sometimes features in my writing, and I dream about her.

Perhaps all that will change as time moves on.

Her life now is not one people would desire. She is bedbound, mostly paralysed, with no comprehensive recollection of who she was, who she is, or who the people around her are.

She has to be fed, cleaned, medicated, and cared for full-time, monitored for sudden changes.

This bleak picture I depict is far, far removed from who my grandmother was and, in my mind, will forever be.

The person I see lying on the hospital bed is not my grandmother. She’s a wobbly, moving reflection of her on water, one that captures a grain of her gist, but only just.

The formidable force that was Bhari Ammi, the tornado of energy and gusto, was always the richest person in every room she occupied. That’s more a testimony to her social circles and our family’s lack of circumstantial opportunities than to her fortune, but nonetheless, she did have more gold chains than two Mr Ts standing next to each other.

She swore like a sailor and ate like a wrestler. She sounded and acted like a man, but had more silk threads and perfume than most women I know.

No man or mountain was comparable to her ego, nor was her mental strength measurable by mere mortals.

I never witnessed a human or animal defeat her in an argument; they gave up as soon as they heard her roaring voice, one that could bring down a concrete wall.

She was everything I feared as a child. One word from her could change the direction of my day, and at her fingertips lay most of my liberties.

She was rarely kind or fair, but always the first to take her share of any family meal—especially birthday cake. Take, take, and take was what she believed in.

I have very few truly good memories of her, and I don’t feel any true love for her, yet she’s influenced much of my life and shaped my personality, and I don’t regret it.

Mostly because she taught me the importance of strength. Seeing her navigate a life filled with adversity with such fearless resilience showed me what strong looks like, but more importantly, the strength she really taught me was how to stand up to her.

I viewed my battles—verbal and mental—with my grandmother very differently as a child and young adult than I do now. She was the villain, and I was the guiltless child. But I’ve moved on from that naïve thinking. Living life teaches you that not everything is so simplistic, and every villain has an origin story. And boy, does my villain (my grandmother) have one. I digress.

I’ll explain what I mean through something a friend recently shared with me, a concept rooted in religion.

My friend explained that before we are born, our souls reside in a place—for the purpose of this writing, let’s call it the place of souls. In the place of souls, the souls know each other and are friends, best friends in some cases. Before a soul is born, it agrees to all the hardships it will face in life, but conveniently forgets all that it agreed to when it’s born.

When a soul’s best friend learns of the hardships it is to endure, that best friend undertakes the responsibility of being the soul’s hardest test. Learning this concept forever changed my perspective of villains.

Even if the place of souls doesn’t exist, even if our villains were never our best friends, this concept allowed me to view my circumstances differently. The fact is, we all need to endure the tests of life. Not always, but often, the people we view as the villains in our stories mould us into who we are. They are the fire that forges us into the gold we become. And if we see them as the best friends we once had in the place of souls, then perhaps we can find it in our hearts and minds to forgive them.

I visited my grandmother today. She was in the same hospital bed she’s been in for weeks, hooked up to all sorts of machines, non-responsive. Still not dead, but not alive. But still my grandmother.

I sat with her for a long time, and when I was ready to leave, I kissed her forehead gently, then whispered in her ear:

I forgive you, best friend.