Vo Mila

My great grandmother died on Sunday, far away from me, back home. She was ninety-seven. She was born in 1909 in Portugal. A well to do young lady is how she told me she was raised to be. She did Conservatory and some kind of ladies finishing school. She was “learned”, as she said and “cultured.” She was extremely gifted at mahjong, all cards games, entertaining, baking and cooking like a chef, playing piano, dancing the waltz, and everything a person does with needles: sewing, knitting, embroidering and other things I don’t know how to say or spell in English. Most women in my family have these 12 foot long dining table cloths she handmade for each of our future weddings. They’re amazing, amazing things to look at, and took her months to finish. She used to knit while talking to me or starring at the TV, without looking at the work she was doing except when it was time to turn. She did all that minute work well after her eyes started to go and her hands got arthritis—in fact the work worsen both conditions. She lost a son to diarrhea when he was 8, her only son. Her husband, a brilliant doctor was in the city and they were in the country when he became ill. Desperate, she got on the train to meet her doctor-husband, but he was on the train to meet her. She said she realized on the train what had transpired, just had a sense that his train passed hers by, and she realized “that it was too late and he wasn’t going to make it.” Her two most prized framed pictures were the ones of him and of her father. Her father was her favorite person in the whole world. When she first started to get sick, she asked for the picture of her dad and hugged it, but then she lost consciousness and the ability to move the right side of her body. Sunday to Sunday it was 8 days of my grandmother and her sister and my family back home waiting for her to finally go. She had a very sad marriage. Her husband cheated for the duration and eventually left her with two young daughters to move in with her mistress of years, now the mother of another two young daughters. In a society small enough to fit into a country club the size of two large Starbucks, she watched him make a living with another woman—a “low life” as she used to say, and everyone watched her stick that humiliation some place unseen. She kept his name her whole life and presented herself everywhere as his Mrs. She almost wanted to die of shame and offense when her own daughters grew up to befriend the half-sisters. And she almost wanted to die of joy when the half-sisters backstabbed her daughters over inheritance. She wrote me the best letters ever because they were meant to tell me everything—she died before she could, but she told me a lot. About age and loneliness and a broken heart and the joy of children and grandchildren and how womanhood would feel like if you lived long enough to lose all vanity. She was hilarious and profoundly sweet. She was also a tyrannical colonial house mistress and independence and black grandchildren never changed that. Her sense of humor was polished: in someone with impeccable manners, every irreverence is made to be worth the while, you know, worth the breach of propriety. So every joke is fantastic. Her jokes were fantastic, theatrically delivered and perfectly calibrated. She had great maxims too, judgments of large issues that were reduced to simple tidbits. The wisdom of 9 decades, clearly being pimped for all the weight it pulls—she was not to be contradicted. Many such “sayings” were reserved for her oldest daughter, my grandmother, who I always tried to defend, to no avail:

“Your grandmother’s development ended at the age of 14. She has the common sense of a 14 year old, and being 60, that makes her borderline retarded.”

Everyone of us had by the time she died offended her deeply and disappointed her deeply at least one time. There was no other way. She was born in 1909! I told her one day, around New Year’s Eve 1999, “Grandmother, it’s the millennium… You’re like totally crashing the 21st Century at this point--none of what we do could possibly make sense to you. You shouldn’t judge—“ and before I could finish she said, “I may have been born in 1909 but there’s always been whores, my dear.” Her name was Maria Emilia Neto Duarte Fonseca. In the year 2000, Portuguese TV interviewed her as the longest living Portuguese citizen living in the ex-colonies. Knowing my family that probably wasn’t the honor—maybe it was more open-ended: one of the ones who had lived the longest in the ex-colonies? One of the oldest still living? One of five? We don’t care, we like our stories legendary: Vo Mila (as we called her) said her mother, who I had the pleasure of hanging out with until I myself was 8, was the first woman to ride like a man in public, wearing pants and straddling a horse, in Lisbon. She also was rumored to be carrying a pet miniscule monkey between her breasts when she did that. Vo Mila worked very hard to never be that woman: everyone else born of her is that woman in many ways.

She takes so much away with her and leaves us so much and we are so, so heartbroken. When I was little she did everything for me. It was so Everything that I wouldn't be able to list what Everything was.

Two weeks ago my son had asked me if everyone got old like Vo Mila one day and if everyone had to die and if so, where did they go and if up to heaven, did they fly. I’m not sure if now I should tell him. I will have to before the summer when he goes back, expecting to find her there again.