Generations

People don't tell you that loving a grandchild is loving the honeyed essence of life itself. They don't talk about this. Maybe it's too fucking big to handle, so they trivialize it or call it sweet, cute. Maybe they don't have the words, or maybe they fear the great heaving truth of sex, passion, attempt and failure, orgasmic rapture and terror that lies between the generations.

Bella hasn't yet cut her lip, chipped a tooth, felt the sickening sweet shock of a bone crack deep inside her. Life hurts as much as it pleases. She hasn't tasted the ache of a bruise, the cold-hot sting of a scraped knee. She's still figuring out how to get up off the ground with feet that haven't walked much. Sometimes she looks just like her father: a tilt of head, a gaze, the saddle of her nose, a curve of cheek, a time bomb.

I hold in my brain and heart what I have felt for him every day of these almost-thirty-nine years, what I felt when he broke his leg, broke the bones in his hand, crashed his car, disappeared for a few months in South Africa. The first time I saw him with a cigarette in his mouth. The first time he got drunk and lied about it.

I see him feel this massive adoration tinged with awe and terror. This kind of love should be like the name of G-d, too big to speak. I l-ve him while he l-ves her and her mother. I l-ve her, and I l-ve the child I was and the grandmother who saved my life, and I l-ve life, which ran out for my grandmother and is running out for me and never more precious. In a few more years, a decade if I'm lucky, I'll be gone. No more ocean, clouds, plum blossoms, rain. This is bigger than anybody ever told me. Grandmother. The word is laden with tired assumptions and patronizing lies. I want another word for l-ve and for this relation of life and death and everything that matters.