Grandmother

Grandmothers pass away. That’s what they do. They’re famous for it. They love you unconditionally in a kind and soft-spoken way that’s completely different from your mother and father. Unlike your parents, they understand very little about you. Conversations with them are forgettable. They send you gifts that are for children much younger than you and they send you checks in amounts that are frivolous. But it is all forgivable. One forgives it because their love is so honest, genuine and pure. One knows that their heart is in the right place even if their mind isn’t. If there were any proof that pacifism and charity can work, it is the grandmother.

She would sit with me and read me the adventures of Christopher Robin. I would listen attentively to every word. She would stop and search through “When We Were Very Young” for boy-related stories and poems for what seemed like forever. I knew she just wanted to find something that I would like, but I just simply wanted to hear her read to me. It didn’t matter what; she could have read to me the dictionary and I would have been content.

She lived a full life into her late eighties with five children and eleven grandchildren. Still, it seems disappointing that she’ll never see me marry or hold a great-grandchild. I’m also certain she forgot who I was years ago. That’s the way the mind is, I guess. The last moment I shared with her was lifting her from her wheelchair to a bed to rest the day before my sister’s wedding. She was scared and confused from the world and my face brought her no comfort.

So, now she’s gone and with it comes a sigh from my father that is both of relief and grief.

I imagine that’s the best way to go.

Deadline

All my life, I have noticed that deadlines, and deadlines alone, have motivated me. In school, I would put things off until the last day and wait for the late night moment of inspiration. Though I worried the moment wouldn’t come, without fail, it always would. And as always, it was amazing and invigorating. As I grow older, tasks are more mundane in my life and require less inspiration (i.e. translation), but my productivity still completely governed by when things are due.

In college, while procrastinating, I even formulated a productivity function based on a deadline. Y = 1/X x P. Y is Productivity, X is Time Remaining and P is the Personal Panic Factor. The less time remaining and the more uptight one is, the more productive they are. Now, some ask about the infinite productivity at the deadline, but one must remember that the transaction time to hand in something makes this infinite productivity unattainable. People also point out that panic can be crippling rather than motivating.

I often joke that in the grand scheme of things, it’s a damn good thing I am mortal. Without the deadline of death, I would get nothing done at all. Of course, with people, we know abstractly that we will die, but we have no clear line. This ambiguous deadline perhaps motivates us to do some things. We better get our marrying done, our children born and our money earned before we get old (though I imagine peer pressure and social norms are probably the largest culprits for human action rather than actual contemplation of death).

Ambiguity, though, may cause humans to be less productive as well. If the Grand Canyon were going to disappear in one year, how many people would go see it? Of course, knowing that it is always there, people put it often and never see it. How many more sunrises will we see in our lives? Thirty? Forty? It is probably a small and limited number, but it seems endless because the exact number is unknown and when we will die is unknown.

I would say that nearly all of us are happy not to know our death day. We don’t want to be crippled by panic. Still, if we did know, our lives would probably be much fuller (and certainly more hectic)