My grandmother has worn black in bereavement for 40 years. Now, I think, she wears it for herself.
Teta, which means Grandma in informal Arabic, is 91 years old. In the last month or so, doctors found too many blockages in her heart to treat effectively. She’s fatigued and in pain, but resolutely against drastic open-heart surgery or harsh treatments that cannot be a complete cure.
“I know it’s because of my age,” she told my mother. “They can’t make me younger,” she said.
“Hurry up and start walking and talking, so I can see you,” my sister overheard her say to my six month old nephew. “Or else I won’t be here to see you when you do,” she finished her thought to him.
Up until her heart troubles, we were all in denial about her fragility and mortality. She is otherwise healthy. She’s active and slimly fit. She’s mentally sharp and charismatically bright. Her hands and moods are steady, except when she chooses to flail them both to share a strongly held opinion. She’s smart. She’s kind, but not foolishly so. She’s comfortable being funny and ferocious, even at the same time. She remains all the things she’s always been. I know this because, over all the years I grew up in the same house, she never grew old. 91 years don’t show up by surprise, but with respect to Teta, her 91 years looked identical to her 61, 71, or 81 years. That is, until the years caught up with her and took all at once what they should have taken by a slow leak over decades.
From my first memories of Teta, she wore black in public because her father died. In an uncompromising adherence to her small Egyptian village’s values, upon her father’s death, all of the women in her household took up wearing black outside of the home, and even though she emigrated in her fifties and was free of those foreign obligations in suburban New Jersey, she kept her commitment. When her husband of over 40 years died, she started wearing black at home too. After a year of staying strictly in black, she expanded her widow’s wardrobe by accepting black pajamas with white embroidery on the sleeves or black sweaters with colored accents on the collar. But when her son passed away in 2008, even the colorful embellishments disappeared. Every time I have looked at her, every time any one has witnessed her physical presence, we also see that she loves and misses these men who have no physical presence except through hers.
There are certainly other burdensome principles from her old land that she’s observed closely, but Teta in black is the most pronounced of them.
It’s especially pronounced because she loves fashion and clothes. Whenever I came home with magazines from the library or thick catalogs clogged our small hanging mailbox or we tuned into a fashion police show, she focused and judged every component of every look.
“The skirt is beautiful, but the bracelet looks cheap…The dress is revealing, but the fabric is luxurious…That hat is stupid, but the pleats on the dress help her figure.” She could go on like this for hours, and in fact she would. She delights in beauty.
Although she never wears any herself, she prefers the look of old Hollywood starlet makeup. The kind of look that is finished with a red, red lip. She favors solid-colored, simple, light silhouettes with delicate architectural details, and she will generously praise not-too-busy patterns or color blocking if done tastefully. She likes pairing the hyper feminine, like full, bold circle skirts in any length, with masculine edges, like chunky oxfords. She loves color, style, grace, attitude, and all the ways those things can be displayed through dress.
My mother, my sister, and I have kept many spoils from shopping sprees only because Teta insisted they were too beautiful to return. On the other hand, she’s made us all cry because she was honest about a dress being too tight or ugly for a special occasion we were nearly out the door to attend. She knows the stretch of fabrics, the lay of various seams; she knows the power of neutral patterns, beading by hand, and sheer overlays; she embraces the drama of a pointy shoe, a heavy earring, a waist-defining belt.
Through and after the critiques, beyond the compliments, around the tears, there she is in flat black. I respect my grandmother’s disciplined personal sacrifice. She’s worn nothing but plain black clothes for four decades, expressing only one part of herself through them—the saddest part. She deprived herself every day of the joy of color and choices because she felt deprived of loved ones. And her clothes say nothing of how her schooling stopped after the elementary grades so she could help in her household, how she stepped in and agreed to marry my grandfather when her sister rejected him because he was an epileptic who needed care, and how, to this day, she still sends financial support back to the last housekeeper she employed in Egypt. If black is old tradition, the will to carry out that commitment dutifully is an inexplicable strength, a strength that I wish deeply could unblock arteries.
Now that she’s aware of her condition and the limits of hope and science, she lets us walk her to the bed or cut up her chicken. She wraps a thin black scarf around her head, but now she doesn’t fuss with a tiny braid peeking out from the bottom. She’s allowing herself to step away from discipline and self-deprivation. I see it.
I wonder because I cannot ask her without offending her foreign sensibilities whether she would like me to wear black for her. Should I wear black to feel her next to me when she can’t stand there any more? I can’t ask her. We can’t ask her what she’d like for her final arrangements. Does she want flowers? Does she want colorful or white ones? Is she scared? I can’t ask her. I can’t risk upsetting her. I can’t risk breaking her already broken heart by crying in front of her.
Instead, when I visit with her, I think to myself: This could be it, this could be “the one more day” I get with her. I hug her and kiss her because I want to remember what one more feels like. She thought the straps on my wide-legged, marigold jumpsuit were too thin and that the neckline v’ed too low, but she liked the fabric. She liked more when I laid my head on her lap, and we watched a black and white Egyptian comedy together. The actresses’ dresses were stunning, and she pointed out a plaid dress especially. She played with my hair and looked at me and smiled.
When it is time to get back up, she offers me her slippers because we share a freakishly small shoe size. “You are like me,” she says. She’s in black. She’s in everything I wear and want to wear.