“Time in the garment is what I repeatedly sought, because sartorial time isn't singular but carries the living desires of bodies otherwise disappeared.” (Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal, 2020)
The other day, I missed my grandmother more pointedly than I usually do. I think of her often, but the grief has become more dissipated, more comfortably a part of my skin in the years since her death in late 2019, as grief tends to do. Yesterday’s loss, however, felt more like an open wound, with a still-fresh sorrow.
Why? Here’s my hypothesis: I was wearing a t-shirt we found in her things two years ago. I wear my grandmother’s clothes – for that matter, everyone’s old clothes – regularly. My closet is positively brimming with habiliments of all decades, genders and sizes. So there’s nothing unusual in my thinking about Paulette by virtue of wearing one of her things. But I don’t think this t-shirt was ever worn. At least, I never saw her in it.
I don’t know why she ordered it. If she ordered it. She usually wore buttoned shirts in bold, colorful patterns, typically assorted to a matching skirt. Every year, she picked out her new ensembles for the season from glossy catalogues. Perhaps this was a free extra with another order – I picture a package of useful cotton basics such as nightgowns and underwear. Perhaps she added them to her order by mistake. Or perhaps she really thought she might wear this tee. We preserve our loved ones in a rigid amber of their perceived or prescribed habits. Maybe my grandmother was going through a cute tee phase. For every possible every scenario, I feel my heart tearing a little.
It’s the mystery that forces me to focus too long and too carefully on my grandmother as a living person in action rather than a warm theory. I picture her looking through her paper catalogues, making her choices. It makes me think of the process of her day. It makes me wonder about her loneliness. I think about her aging, the fact that my inability to imagine her slipping on a t-shirt isn’t just the result of my rigid sense of her representative costume but also something practical: in her late nineties, whether her body would be able to repeatedly carry out certain quotidian motions was always a point to consider in choosing how to attire it.
I look onto these scenes both imagined and remembered with softness and love and pathos, but also a certain amount of… is it pity? This discomfits me. There’s judgement in my pity: oh, my poor old grandmother who never wanted to get a computer and became a body who could not do all the things I as a body take for granted. How unfathomable and utterly foreseeable. My pity is a distancing reaction as I find myself unbearably close to her once again. Suddenly, I’m a teenager on vacation. I’m seated sideways on the old leather armchair of a house 800 meters away from where I currently type this. She’s half-reclining on the matching leather sofa to my right. I hear the pages turning and smell her soap. Or, my Breton sojourn is ended. She is alone in the very same position, and I am absent.
Absence and interruption. While wearing her clothes isn’t notable, the fact that this simple tee was – to my knowledge – unworn seems more difficult to swallow. I’m not wearing a garment that contains the memory of my grandmother; I’m wearing one that never had the chance to contain her.
Ugh, I LOVED reading this ❤️🩹
Stunning. Thank you for sharing this