the way we age now

the first time i noticed (and loved) the softness of my grandmother's skin, i was five years old. i was running about the apartment, refusing to take a bath, hiding behind the lacy white curtains by the living room veranda that smelled like sticky dust. in the instantaneous moment when my grandmother reached for me and i reached out for her, my fingers met her arm - met the fragile epithelial layers coating her vessels and bones like a muslin coat - and i reeled in shock at the pale, sweet softness. in the bath, i rubbed at my skin, threw water over it, willed it to roll into the same smooth suppleness. it stared at me, yellow, rough, and young, scarred with the dirt of my exploits.
sometimes, at church, or beside her in the taxi cab, i would tug at her sleeve and creep in my fingers to get a stroke of the lush peach of her arms.

four years ago, my grandmother decided to stop dying her hair. my uncle, the cool car designer living in turin, had informed her it was all the rage, in europe, to look old and wisened, and her locks fell white and clean, sparkling like dusty christmas snow by her gucci glasses and ferragamo scarves.

once, i'd learned in a whisper from an adjacent room that my grandmother was four months pregnant with my mother on her wedding day. she had hid her belly with the folds of her gown, bandaged herself into thinness. my mother was born premature, tiny. my grandmother always blamed herself.
i think of this as i wish her goodbye, press my face into the plush rose of her smell.

i don't know why i am writing this now, except that i just read a beautiful and important essay by Atul Gawande called the way we age now, and i feel like i want to remember what it really means to grow old. not to decompose, to find our cells slowly pulling apart, but to more fully understand beauty, and wiseness, to collect experiences in our pocket like small pebbles we can rub with the deep flesh of our thumbs.