When I graduated from college in Portland, Oregon, eight years ago, I dreamed of taking my Spanish degree and adventurous spirit by the arm and moving abroad, where I would quickly find a gay lover who would introduce me to new languages, new foods and other ways to fuck.
Instead, I returned home to Saint Paul, Minnesota, and settled into my Irish grandmother’s Catholic senior citizen home. We barely spoke to each other and she didn’t eat. At 90, having lived a long and healthy life, she had decided to starve and I had decided, at my mother’s request, to be by her side.
My grandmother had left Ireland for the United States sixty-five years ago. Though she still had a thick accent and she preferred tea to coffee, she didn’t revel in the stories of the beautiful country she had left behind.
“Sean and Jimmy Hated Ireland”, he often said about my brother and cousin, who had studied there in the early 2000s. “It was always raining and their feet were never dry.”
waiting for heaven
To me, all I had heard was that they loved their semesters in Ireland; they had never complained of wet feet. However my grandmother had left this damp gray island brutalized by British imperialism and she had never looked back. She had arrived in the lights and buzz of New York, the opposite of her wave-swept homeland. She wore pink linen pantsuits and turquoise floral tops, never beige wool or plaid maxi skirts. She preferred spicy tomato pasta to potatoes and wholemeal bread.
When she turned 90, my grandmother decided to die, with the same certainty and determination as when she left her native country. Since she had been healthy all her life and was still lucky enough to walk, talk and cook normally, she stopped eating. There was no debate in the family as to whether she would be force-fed or somehow forced to live longer than her body could handle. She just sat in her chair, wrapped in rosaries, waiting for what she thought was the next step: Heaven.
My grandmother soberly announced her decision to die a month after my graduation. Since I was unemployed at the time and basically without a focus (aside from learning new languages, new foods, and other ways to fuck), I was the obvious candidate to keep him company during his final moments.
Far from fantasies
For six weeks, then, I spent my days screaming in front of the TV (she was no longer wearing her hearing aids) as she starved herself to death lying quietly in her bed. In the morning, we listened to public radio (well me, she probably couldn’t hear), I made some eggs on toast and brought them to her on a plate, knowing she would wordlessly refuse to eat. After an hour, it was me who ate them.
I was baking bicarbonate of soda bread, a traditional Irish recipe I’d found in a yellowing newspaper in her drawer, only to end up eating half of it myself and giving the rest to the neighbors – usually nuns who were delighted to have bread from ” real” Irish cuisine. In the evening, an old Italian priest knocked on the door and brought the consecrated wafer, which my grandmother solemnly received on her tongue.
I got it too, not because I believed it was the body of Christ, but because I knew it was the only way to share a meal with my grandmother. Needless to say, my life was unlikely to lead to sex or most other “sins”. So I had nothing to confess before swallowing the wafer.
I quickly discovered that the human body can function on very little food. For several days we went down to the hall to attend daily mass. While other devotees arrived in shabby slippers or even bathrobes, my grandmother wore dresses covered in tropical patterns and a glittering gold watch on her wrist, even in the face of death.
Far from my South American fantasies, I found myself single and surrounded by the earthy white faces of nuns and widows. There was no man in my daily life except the bloodied, crucified, muscular (and weirdly sexy) Christ hanging above the altar.
Restless eyes like the sea
Even though we were very close, especially as I walked her towards the end, my grandmother didn’t know I was gay and I didn’t tell her.
After a few weeks he could no longer get dressed, go to mass or leave good things to eat for the neighbours. Her pearly white skin had turned gray like dish water, her piercing green eyes were dull like the sea she had once crossed.
Out of religious fervor or simply to drown out the smell of decay, the priest lit a large candle depicting Jesus with a flaming crowned heart protruding from his chest. Just as the lace curtains did little to mask Irish poverty, this rose-scented candle did little to mask the aroma of death that permeated the room.
One day, my grandmother was in bed, Margaret Thatcher’s funeral was on television. My grandmother, who hadn’t spoken for days, nodded in front of her face and said: “Here’s one I won’t find in heaven.”
Like many Irish people, my grandmother had never forgiven Margaret Thatcher for her determination to keep Northern Ireland within the UK, and especially her notorious indifference to the late Bobby Sands of a hunger strike during the detention when he was in power.
I don’t know if my grandmother saw the parallel: like Bobby Sands [qui luttait pour la liberté de l’Irlande]he was on hunger strike, but he was against aging.
Adrift
My grandmother survived six weeks without food, almost as long as Bobby Sands, who survived sixty-six days at the age of 27. After his death, I found myself jobless and aimless again, single, living with my parents, and filled with that sense of drift that one fears will never pass in my early twenties.
I tried Grindr to pretend I didn’t spend the last few months in a Catholic senior citizen home, going to mass every day and accompanying my grandmother until she died. I’ve never told most of the men I’ve met, either then or in the years since.
However, on my first appointment with Matin, I opened up like I never have before. Something in his warm brown eyes told me I didn’t need to lie. We strolled through Central Park and he spoke fondly of his parents, Iranian Muslims, and the various foods, taboos, and parties that seemed to rule their lives. I knew that, like me, he was no stranger to prayers, incense, candles, rosaries and rituals for their own sake.
We kissed in the park and I invited him for a drink. She replied that she would like to but that she had promised her grandmother to bring him Iranian dishes to the hospital.
“He absolutely refuses to eat American hospital food, he explained laughing. If I don’t go, he’ll starve.
I watched him go off to do his family duty filled with a calm curiosity I’d never felt after a first kiss.
A love mixed with duties
Years later, Matin and I taught each other our grandmothers’ cooking. She filled our kitchen with the scent of saffron and sumac and she grew to love Irish baking soda bread.
My grandmother died without knowing that I was gay. It’s not that I thought she would be against it; it’s just that the topic didn’t come up and I didn’t bring it up. Even Matin’s grandmother, who is still alive, doesn’t know that he is gay. She comes from a country where homosexuality can earn you the death penalty. Mine had left a country once ruled by Catholicism and which had been the first to authorize same-sex marriage by referendum.
Straight people typically don’t envision hiding an essential part of their identity from those close to them. And some gay men would surely consider us cowards, Morning and Me, for not being straight with our grandmothers — for not revealing our true selves to them — and would argue that it’s not true love if you hide a part of yourself as important.
My only answer is that love is complex and varied. In immigrant families, it is often intertwined with duty and caring. For Matin, the amour is the Persian rugs that we hand down to each other, the five daily prayers and the perfectly browned rice at the bottom of the pan.
For me, it was being in the company of my Irish grandmother as she chose to leave as she wished, cursing Margaret Thatcher’s name to the end.
