Thinking back to all my most memorable moments, it seems vague to mention the most beautiful to be that of me securing a position in class, or scoring a basket at a match or a song well sung. My beautiful moment was one born of a sad situation. Like they say, every cloud has a silver lining, so my story goes. For my cloud was a large one, but the lining was more beautiful than any other.
My grandmother and I never really had the best of relationships. Having lived in the same house for 17 years, we’d seen it all but each other’s demons. So it was no surprise we quarelled all the time. To me, she was an old and extremely orthodox lady with a lot to say who refused to keep up with the times. To her, I was a rebellious teenager who was lost in a world of evil temptations, or so she would say. I remember sometimes losing my cool and saying hurtful things to her, or even mocking her behind her back. Honestly, I never meant any intentional harm. I just found her to be amusing at times when she’d scold me for a skirt too short, or coming home after dark or even my eating habits. I never paid any heed to her scoldings because I felt she didn’t understand the ways of the world now in these modern times. Little did I know how wrong I was.
She was diagnosed with a ruptured artery in her heart a year ago. None of us kids knew for sure what it meant exactly and nobody really took the time to tell us. My grandmother was a strong woman but after having lost her brothers to the same dreaded disease and that too on the operating table, she was too afraid to go in for treatment. She was open to taking oral medicines but that was all. We watched her slowly fight the long and painful battle with this disease. I watched as it ate its way inside her body and into her soul and as it turned my ever so youthful and loud grandma into an older, shrunken solemn corpse. Seeing her that way tore a part of me every time. Seeing her smile was now a rare occasion. Months passed while I watched her suffer and I watched as a little part of her die as that disease took over her life. She moved out of our home and went to stay at her ancestral home, though we did take turns spending the night with her so as she wouldn’t be alone.
On one of these nights, I sat by the window and I remember it being a rainy night and I was reading a book when I heard soft sobs from her room. I stood up and walked towards the sobs, it broke my heart to think of my grandma alone and brooding over her painful demise. I stood at the door of her room and watched as she was bent over on her knees on her bed and I saw her tears stream down onto the clean sheets. I sat down with her on the bed and put my hand on her back, I had no words; there was nothing I could say to make things better. I waited for the breakdown, for her to finally lose it and emotionally break, and that was when I saw the most beautiful thing I could ever imagine at that point of time. My grandmother looked up to me, and smiled. Her face filled with tears streaming down her face but on it the most radiant and genuine smile I’d seen in a long time. It was the smile we all had yearned to see through these tough months. She smiled. I was confused and ended up breaking into laughter. I asked her why, and she stared at me for what seemed a life time and then broke into laughter with me. We both shared this brief moment of laughter with so much happiness. At that moment, nothing was bigger than us, nothing scared us. We were happy. I never wanted that moment to end. No words were needed, I knew what she felt and she knew it too. That night held the most beautiful moment of my entire life. She told me she loved me that night, although she’d said it to me before all the time, I felt her love right there and then and I had never loved her as much as I did that night. That was the last time I saw her smile, let alone laugh and it was beautiful.