I watched all of this unfold mostly from a slight distance, since I lived twenty minutes from Grandma and saw her more regularly than the rest of the family did, and I remember feeling something I can only describe now as cautious relief. I’d spent years quietly worried that my father’s neglect of his own
mother, small and undramatic as it usually was, some slow erosion of attention rather than any single cruel act, was simply the shape their relationship had permanently taken. Watching it seem to reverse itself felt like watching a garden come back after a hard winter.
Grandma bloomed under the attention too, the way anyone would. She started wearing her good earrings more often, the pearls Grandpa had given her on their fortieth anniversary, small things that signaled, to anyone who knew her, that she felt like herself again in a way she hadn’t in a while.
