Four years ago, I spent a morning cooking couscous with my grandmother Denise near Grenoble, France, where she has lived most of her life. We peeled carrots and turnips, seared lamb and chicken, tied bouquets of herbs, and mixed hot water into the grains with our bare hands. I wrote down her recipe as we went along. That day, I recorded a video of her on my phone. She was sitting in a familiar kind of wooden IKEA chair that you have probably sat on before and that I will always associate with her.
Yes, I told her. I was returning to the United States, where my parents moved our family when I was eighteen months old. I found it painful to leave; each time we visited France, the progression of her disease seemed to become more unignorable. Her pencil trembled when she practiced her handwriting. She moved her daily baguette from the kitchen counter into the plate drawer. Late at night, she muttered and puttered around her apartment. When her wandering inconvenienced us, we guided her back to her chair.
My family talked about the chair as if it were her refuge; it was probably more accurately described as our refuge from her confusion. In the summer of , my grandmother stopped eating and getting out of bed.
She had fallen, fractured a vertebra, and forgotten about it. I lay in bed with her until she fell asleep. I fed her. I learned, for the first time in my life, what it meant to care for someone.
We viewed her isolation in her seventh-floor apartment as a risk to her health and safety, and felt that it was not only right but necessary to exchange what was left of her autonomy for the round-the-clock, structured care that she could receive at a nursing home.
