I’m sitting cross-legged on the grass in front of Nana’s apartment building, the one she’s lived in for nearly three decades. It’s a beautiful day and the lawn is a sunny, royal green.
Nana is the most formidable person I know. She moved into this apartment when she was eighty, and now, at aged one hundred and seven, is being moved to a nursing home.
For the move at eighty, my mother wished she could bring herself to travel to Rochester to help. But she didn’t, because she was already in Maine for the summer (home was Philadelphia) and Mom did not leave Maine, not for grandchildren’s birthday parties or most weddings. Only the funeral of a very close-in relatives, such as her father, could pry her away. Nevertheless, Mom ginned up intense guilt at the thought that she wasn’t helping her eighty-year old mother.
Nana’s apartment is on Rochester’s most elegant street, East Avenue, named after the city’s famous son, George Eastman, an entrepreneur who founded Eastman Kodak. Kodak brought rolls of film into ordinary people’s homes so they could record their family history in photos.
Nana calls them “snapshots.” She has plenty around her apartment, including one of Hyman Green under the glass top of her dresser. Hyman was a family friend with whom Nana had a long-term affair starting when Mom was in high school. Nana would leave Mom and my grandfather for the winter to meet Hyman in Florida. My grandfather and Mom would “take their dinners in a boarding house,” was how Mom phrased it.
Mom died seven years ago.
Aunt Opal, mom’s older sister, now in her mid-eighties, has insisted on Nana’s move. Nana has had too many spills in the bathtub, and Aunt Opal lives in California, 3000 miles away. Aunt Opal and Uncle Lou have flown in to supervise the move. My sister and I have traveled from Providence and Washington, DC respectively to serve as clean-up, sorting, and mop-up crew.
For the move, Nana gets dressed up, puts on nylons, teal raincoat buttoned with sash tied, purse upright in her lap, and sits on the couch waiting to be extracted from her home of twenty-seven years. She’s very hard of hearing, but she has all, and I mean all, her marbles. She knows what’s happening, knows she hasn’t been given a choice.
My aunt and uncle escort Nana to the door, a one-way trip if ever there was one. Nana is her usual ramrod straight, walking ahead of them to the elevator. No words are exchanged, no acknowledgement of this Thing that is happening—momentous—the first time in eighty-seven years that Nana has not overseen her own home.
My sister and I spend the rest of the morning disposing of sticky old jars—lids long gone—pasted to the floor of the metal cabinet under the sink with drippings of God knows what. We empty the kitchen cabinets of a few lifeless bags of instant ramen and half-used cardboard containers of celery salt, Nana’s seasoning of choice. We find a few pieces of fine china, none of it intact. If it isn’t chipped, it’s glued together, presumably by Nana, the seam cracks evident.
We go through Nana’s rolltop desk where she has written thousands of letters, one a week to each daughter, with the firm expectation that they write back. Which they did, for decades upon decades. After Mom died, I continued this practice. As nasty as Nana is, I couldn’t stand the thought of her not getting a weekly letter from our side of the family. Nana has macular degeneration, so I type my letter in bold, 28-point font.
It’s after I drop my sister at the airport that I collapse on the lawn in front of 5500 East Avenue. I’m crying my eyes out and shaking my fist skyward. How could you leave me with this Mom?
But I know the answer. And I agree. Nana was so mean to you, Mom. You died before Nana in order to save your own life. Left in such a hurry that you surprised the doctors with your speed, pancreatic cancer notwithstanding.
The next morning, I drive to see Nana and say goodbye until my next visit. When I arrive, a rotting banana peel like the kind used in slapstick comedy routines, is spread out just in front of the glass entrance.

[Names changed to protect people’s privacy]