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Pomona College Magazine is published three times a year by Pomona College
550 N. College Ave, Claremont, CA 91711
Online Editor: Mark Kendall
For editorial matters:
Editor: Mark Wood
Phone: (909) 621-8158
Fax: (909) 621-8203
PCM Editorial Guidelines
Contact Alumni Records for changes of address, class notes, or notice
of births or deaths.
Phone: (909) 621-8635
Fax: (909) 621-8535
Email: alumni@pomona.edu
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The God on My Grandfather's Table
Christine Henneberg '05 claimed second
place in the competition for the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics in 2005
with this sensitive essay on the tenuous links between the old and the
young ...
By Christine Henneberg '05
He wakes up to the light slipping between the cracks in the blinds.
The room is cool; the air feels familiar and smells clean as it always
does, especially on Sundays because the housecleaners come on Saturday
afternoons. He lies on the right side of the bed, where the fitted sheet
is worn and thin. Squinting as his eyes adjust to the light, he reaches
for his cane next to the bedside table, swings his legs, slowly, one at
a time, over the edge of the bed, and places his feet on the carpeted
floor. His back aches mildly along his spine; the skin on his throat and
the back of his neck itches again.
Pressing his hands gently into the firm mattress, he pushes himself up
and walks a few slow steps to the bathroom, where the gray plastic box
with the dual compartments for each day of the week sits on the counter.
SUNDAY, A.M. A bar of white soap balances on the edge of the sink. The
digital clock next to his shaving mirror says 7:30. It will take him all
morning to shower, shave, dress himself, eat a bowl of bran flakes and a
banana, and drag in the newspaper from outside the front door.
Throughout the morning and all day long, he will wait for a phone call,
a knock on the door, some voice to break the silence.
My grandfather, my mother’s father, lives alone in an assisted-living
condominium complex for adults 70 years and up. It is a good place for
him, just a few blocks from my parents’ house. When my grandmother died
four years ago, my mom and I began visiting my grandfather often at his
apartment. Sometimes we would help him around the house, doing simple
chores that would have taken him hours to do on his own. In our first
visits, I paid attention to how my mother and her father talked to each
other. I had never tried to really talk with any of my grandparents, and
I had a notion of old people as fragile or broken. To my amazement, my
mother spoke to him like a regular adult. She handled him swiftly and
gently, the way an expert mover might pack boxes of fine china.
Sometimes I would even hear traces of my own adolescent voice in hers—an
exasperated sigh or a patient explanation.
“Dad, can I heat up that soup for you?”
“You don’t have to do that,” he replied.
“It’s no problem, it’ll only take a few minutes.”
“Well okay, but I won’t eat it just yet.”
“I’ll at least pour it in a pot for whenever you’re hungry.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see my mother through the cutout in
the kitchen wall as she bent over and peered into the wide white stomach
of the refrigerator. I watched the way her shoulders and arms moved,
putting things away and pulling things out of cupboards, quickly but
carefully, motherly.
My grandfather leaned back in his armchair with his eyes closed.
I closed my eyes too. I could hear my mother’s footsteps on the
linoleum, heavy and with a purposeful rhythm. The refrigerator door
opened and closed, opened again. I heard water running over dishes,
plates clicking into their slots in the plastic drying rack. I wondered
how long he and I would sit like this, in the dark.
My mother’s voice came from the kitchen. “There’s so much Tupperware in
here, Dad. … Do you use all this Tupperware?”
“Oh, well, I don’t know how often I use it. … I don’t think I have that
much.”
I opened my eyes. My mother emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands
on the front of her jeans. “OK, I pulled out the pot, it’s on the stove.
You should think about getting rid of some of that Tupperware.”
Things accumulate in my grandfather’s house, littering the counters like
the pale brown spots scattered up and down his arms. Maybe he saves it
all because he thinks it might be important someday, for some reason.
Maybe he uses things to fill up all the empty space that used to be
filled with people.
In another time in another city, my grandparents had a home full of
children. My mother is the oldest of four: three daughters and a son.
They grew up in the 1950s, in the kind of family that was at the center
of American culture: young, steadily consuming, growing and thriving.
Parents of young children have always had an important and recognized
role in any society. They perform an important function and fulfill a
noble purpose. But in some western cultures such as our own, the
function and purpose of a parent is quite limited. As children grow up,
leave home, and have their own children, the values of mobility and
individuality take hold, and the oldest generation is quickly forgotten
and ignored. Houses that were once warm and busy feel empty and silent.
Now I have grown up and left my parents. The cycle is beginning to turn
once again. When I return home to sleep in my old bedroom in my parents’
house, I also visit my grandfather. Sometimes I go with my mother, but
more often I go alone. I have the impression that it is unusual to spend
as much time as I do with him. When I mention to my friends that I am
close to my grandfather, they sometimes say, “I didn’t know that about
you!” As though it were a hidden talent or a deep secret.
Usually I find him in his brown armchair. That is where he rests, in
between the daily tasks that have become the industrious agents of time.
Today he is wearing his fleece pants and a well-worn green T-shirt that
says, “I’m in Ship Shape—Royal Caribbean Cruise Line.” I sit down next
to him and follow his gaze out the window to the front lawn. A strip of
white-blue sky is visible above the curve of the sidewalk.
The silence in the house has grown louder since my grandmother died. As
we sit in the living room her personality, her taste, and her artistic
sensibility surround us. They join in our conversation the way she might
have done. An oil painting of the Northern California coastline, which
she painted long before I was born, lights up the wall above the couch
with its whitecaps and yellow cliffs. On the opposite wall is a set of
low cabinets with screened doors. Wooden cranes line up along the
bookshelves like watchful children.
On the coffee table, a set of miniature figurines is arranged in a
semi-circle. They are the seven Japanese gods of luck; each represents a
different aspect of happiness and good fortune in Japanese mythology.
Jurojin sits in the middle. He is the god of old age, wisdom, and
longevity. He is accompanied by wild animals, and he carries with him a
scroll on which the life story of all creation is written. With his
flowing white beard and his laughing eyes, Jurojin embodies good nature,
patience and strength.
“Your grandmother was just fascinated by Japanese art,” my grandfather
has recalled to me more than once. “We took a trip to Japan one time,
and it completely changed her taste and her style. It changed our home,
the way she decorated. Now I still have these things, the furniture and
the artwork; and they remind me of her. She changed my taste in art,
too.”
Later I sit with him at the dining room table, picking through telephone
bills and junk mail. He tells me about a magazine that keeps billing him
even though he hasn’t renewed his subscription. I find a renewal notice
from several weeks ago: “WE WILL NOT SEND YOU ANOTHER LETTER! THIS IS
YOUR LAST CHANCE!” We talk about his back exercises, the dry skin on his
neck, his doctor’s appointment tomorrow.
Finally he rests his spotted hands on a stack of mutual fund statements
and gazes up at the glow of the hanging lamp above the table. He tells
me that he is getting tired. It is almost nine o’clock—the end of his
evening, the beginning of mine. I think about the many hours that I will
still be awake after I get back home, reading and talking on the phone.
“It was sure nice of you to spend a few hours with me tonight, and help
me with all this work,” he says.
I tell him no problem; I’m happy to help.
He unbends his knees and stands, balancing himself against the back of a
chair, gripping his cane. I am still shuffling papers and reaching for
my keys. He begins moving into the hallway; he will reach the door in
time to give me a hug and a kiss goodbye.
“Thanks for hanging out,” I say as I kiss his cheek and hold onto his
shoulders. Then I turn away, and the door swings open and shut too
quickly.
Whenever I visit a museum with a collection of Japanese art, I am
reminded of my grandmother. I can feel her artistic taste resonate
within me, because she took her taste beyond Japan and beyond a museum;
she brought it into her home and made it a part of her daily life. My
grandfather still lives under the watchful eyes of her wooden cranes.
Bamboo stalks on rice paper scrolls frame his doorway; the glint of
green jade catches his eye in the afternoon sunlight. These things
inform his memories of the past and his construction of the future.
Just as my grandmother’s appreciation for Japanese art changed her own
taste, my grandfather’s, and mine, different cultures offer paradigms
that we can use to change our moral values and behaviors. But we must
first take these models out of anthropology and sociology textbooks and
bring them into our homes, our families, and our own lives.
The Japanese, like so many Asian cultures, venerate their very old. The
logical understanding is that the elderly have accumulated vast
knowledge and wisdom that has infinite value, on an individual level as
well as for the collective culture. This attitude is reflected in
societal structures: intergenerational support within families;
ritualized respect for elders in religious communities; and a paradigm
of humanity that embraces the young and the old, joy and pain, life and
death.
Such a paradigm seems immensely freeing compared to a model of strictly
defined roles and narrow values of human worth. Instead of revering old
people, American society rejects and isolates them. It is a rejection
born of fear and confusion. We think we can smell death in nursing homes
and geriatric wards; but what we smell in the sterilized, medicinal air
is our own denial—denial of our own future, of our inevitable mental and
physical deterioration, and of death. We do not think of old people as
full of accumulated life; instead we think of them as dangerously close
to death. We herd them out of sight to protect ourselves, leaving them
to sit alone in their dark rooms.
The people in those dark rooms are our parents and grandparents. They
have much that they could teach us, particularly about the scope and
beauty of human life beyond what we see on television. By participating
in the lives of older people, we could learn to view ourselves as
valuable long after our 30th, 50th, and 70th birthdays. At the same
time, the wonder and optimism of children could be a source of joy for
older persons. People of different ages have so much to offer to each
other, but in a paradigm that privileges the young and shuts out the
old, everyone loses. Vast rivers of wisdom that could flow between
generations have run dry.
The problem is that it is hard to imagine how to change this paradigm,
because it is so deeply engrained in our culture. It seems almost
impossible to conceptualize old age without the stigma that we have
attached to it. But when we take examples from other cultures, it is
possible. Culture is not like the air we breathe; it is not a given. We
have created it and we continue to create it every day. Culture is like
the air only in the way that it surrounds us. Our beliefs and values and
behaviors are so pervasive that they become invisible, and sometimes
they become suffocating. This is where ethics must enter the picture. If
we define ethics as standards of behavior based on our most fundamental
values, then we are caught in a narrow ethical paradigm, unless we can
draw upon values and paradigms other than our own. We cannot simply
transplant paradigms from Japanese culture into our culture; our lives
may simply be too different. But we would be mistaken to think of these
differences as essential—East versus West, “traditional” versus
“modern,” them versus us. Despite significant differences, we can still
think about other cultures, their paradigms, and the freedoms that they
offer. This can help us to broaden our space of ethical thought and our
capacity for a moral imagination. Then we can begin to see the culture
that surrounds us and to visualize alternatives.
One alternative is the paradigm that we find in Japanese and other Asian
cultures, in which systems of multigenerational, interdependent kinship
are linked together by a sense of obligation to and respect for older
relatives. In Japanese households children, parents, and grandparents
may live under one roof, or in some cases one room. In India, a separate
room for each person in the house is almost unheard of. The cultural
value of privacy falls far behind the values of community, shared space,
and shared knowledge. Instead of being silenced and isolated, the old
are called upon to share their perspective and wisdom, while the young
unwittingly share their own sense of wonder at seeing the world through
fresh eyes.
The more time that I spend with my grandfather, the more I am able to
understand what his life is like, and to imagine what it will be like
for me to grow old in this country. And it frightens me. Unless
something changes drastically in my generation, my peers and I will find
ourselves at the ends of long, full lives, with so many collected
experiences and so many thoughts in our heads, and no one to share them
with. If we continue in the current paradigm, distanced from our own
aging parents and grandparents, we are only becoming more vulnerable to
the cruelty of a culture that idealizes the young and the beautiful,
stigmatizes the old and the suffering, and leaves all of us alone in the
end.
When I leave my grandfather’s house, when I shut the door behind me and
imagine him on the other side—that is when I feel the most afraid.
Slowly, carefully, he walks back into the living room, steadying himself
with his cane in his right hand, softly touching the fingertips of his
left hand to the wall. In the kitchen, he wipes down the counter with a
damp paper towel that he’s been using for a few days. It is beginning to
smell a little, the way those paper towels sometimes do. He shakes the
little crumbs out of it and drapes it over the faucet. He washes his
hands with slippery green dish soap, then makes his way to the bathroom.
His cotton nightgown is hanging on the inside of the door. He unhooks it
and places it on the sink counter, making sure the counter is dry first.
Then he eases himself down onto the little folding stool next to the
sink and unties each shoe, pulls off each sock, folds them and places
them on the floor next to the wastebasket. He will put them in the
hamper tomorrow. He unbuttons his shirt, stands up and inches out of his
trousers, places them on the floor with the socks, and raises his arms
slowly to pull the nightgown over his head. After this, he brushes his
teeth. Finally, he takes the pills from the SUNDAY P.M. compartment of
the plastic gray box, popping them in his throat one at a time,
swallowing each one with a sip of water.
He steadies himself with his cane again and, pushing the door open with
one hand, turns off the bathroom light and steps out onto the carpeted
bedroom floor. The deep carpet fibers feel soft on the bottoms of his
feet. The cane goes in its usual place against the bedside table; he
pulls back the blankets and eases the weight of his body onto the
mattress, lifting one foot up at a time onto the bed. He can feel the
movement in the joints at his hips, turning like the pedals of an old
bicycle. Finally, with the blankets pulled back up to his chest, he
props himself up on his right hand, reaches across with his left, and
switches off the lamp on the table.
The air conditioner rattles and hums softly in the living room. Outside,
a few early crickets buzz and the dim glow of a streetlamp stretches its
familiar patch across the carpet and part of the dresser. The cool
sheets are beginning to warm against his body. He bends his left arm at
the elbow and lies his face down across it, so that the loose skin of
his forearm with its fine white hair pushes up into the hollow spaces
around his eyes.
In the dark, silent room, voices echo in his ears. Among them is my
grandmother’s voice, the strokes of her paintbrush and her footsteps in
the kitchen. There are the cries of newborn babies who have grown into
adults, and the whispers of their watchful parents. There is the
laughter of Jurojin, the smooth rustle of rice paper, and the beating of
cranes’ wings as they circle above my grandfather’s sleeping head.
Reprinted with permission from The Elie Wiesel Foundation for
Humanity.
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