What I learnt when I couldn’t forget my grandmother

Reflections of my neurodivergent self on my odd grandmother

All week, I have been dealing with rejections and the hurdles of academic life, oscillating between fury, paralysis, and disillusionment. I am full of words of protest, realization, and contempt, and yet, the only subject I feel like writing about is my grandmother.

Her name was Maura Maffei. She was born in 1930 and died in 2013. More than ten years later, I still remember the high-pitched note of her giggling laugh. I replay it often in my mind, just to make sure that it’s still alive in some remote part of my brain.

She was, in many ways, a terrible woman—a strict mother, a demanding wife, with no friends outside of family members and childhood acquaintances. But for as long as I can remember, I always had a feeling that we clicked. I was a shy child with peculiar interests, never invited to birthday parties, and I overly enjoyed playing with this old, fat woman. Across timeless summer days, when I was sick and stayed home from school, and on Sunday afternoons, we recited the same nursery rhymes, poems, and songs over and over. I excitedly mirrored her lively hand gestures mimicking the verses. We endlessly rubbed our palms with Nivea hand cream from a blue tin she always kept in her bag, moving in the same circling motions, in perfect synchrony. We drew hundreds of perfectly rounded, matching cherries on neat pieces of paper, and she told me the tale of the two sisters sent to the woods to return a sieve. I am sure she knew more fables, but she only ever told me that story, and I never wanted to hear another.

We had our moments of discord, for example, when she relentlessly insisted on combing my hair. I was extremely sensitive as a child and hated it—it gave me intense pain. But she persisted, and I fought her wildly as she unknotted my long, thick hair, parted it into two perfect halves, and twisted the locks into two interminable braids. After she was done, she always performed a little gesture on my head for good luck, looking immensely pleased. I was not. But she conceded that I could sit on her very short legs and hide my face between her extra-large breasts, which I used to call my pillows.

After the combing ceremony, we’d watch Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman together, a show we were absolutely obsessed with. When we didn’t watch together, I called her on the landline immediately after the episode ended to comment what had come to pass in Colorado Springs.

When I stayed at her home, she always cooked the same meal—pasta with chickpeas—which I loved. I liked to tease her because she didn’t want me to drink water before eating at least one piece of pasta. So, as soon as she wasn’t looking, I’d gulp down an entire glass, gurgling as loudly as I could. Outraged, she’d spend a good five minutes telling me off. I’d also fake not being hungry and hide under the table, so she’d walk out to the kitchen, waiting for me to snaffle the food and eat it under the tablecloth. When she returned to find the plate empty, she always acted surprised, and I’d jump out of my hideout in triumph. Every. Single. Time.

Her house was full of toys—dolls and Sylvanian Families. At the time, I assumed they must have been my aunt’s from when she was little, but after my grandmother died, we found countless dolls my aunt had never seen. They must have been hers. I also loved to roam and hide in her garden, a forest of tangled shrubs, mountains of pine needles, and broken tiles.

What I did not see through or understand, as a child, were the lenses of senile decline. Her repetitiveness, which I so much enjoyed, was alarming to her children and husband—a sign of progressive memory loss. Of what she had just done, just said. She was no longer cooking, sticking to one dish at best, and her house, once pristine, was uncleaned. Her garden was rotting. She had stopped bathing. She and my grandfather moved in with us so she could be cared for.

I remember the times she was forced to shower in my parents’ house on Sunday mornings. She cried for help, yelling that they were hurting her, calling for her mother. I carry her mother’s name. I hid my face in my pillow, waiting for it to end.

Despite being less present every passing day, she showed occasional signs of self-awareness that surprised me. Once, I was sitting at her feet, turning and showing her the pages of one of our beloved illustrated books of fables. I reached the end, waited five minutes, and started over. She went over the pages with me every time with the same enthusiasm. After a few rounds, I looked up at her, and I have never forgotten her expression. She became serious and said:

“You don’t have to do that.”

I stopped.

Once, she was hospitalized for suspected pneumonia. My father took me and my siblings to see her, but we stalled at the door, intimidated by the dimly lit hospital room. She was sitting in an armchair, facing the window, and gave no sign that she had noticed us. My father shook her shoulder, telling her the children were there, and she said, I know, pointing at our reflection in the window glass.

Any time, on my commute, when I watch people’s faces reflected in the windows against the grim London weather, I end up thinking about her. She’s telling me: I know.

By the end of her life, she was placed in an institution, and she stopped talking. I visited her at least once every couple of weeks and recited for her the nursery rhymes and poems she had taught me when I was little. Though she didn’t speak, she whispered the words and mirrored my gestures. While she seemed happy to see me, she never said my name or gave any sign that she knew who I was. However, once, a visitor asked her who that beautiful young girl was. She flashed her eyes at him and defiantly pointed at herself with her whole, clenched hand. Mine.

I do not know what really happened to my grandmother. But I do know that, in her supposed decline, I related to her like I did to no one else at that time in my life. She allowed me to express the pleasure I found in repetition. She fed my very first special interests— that are denied to many autistic children—without ever questioning the fun of it. Now that I understand more about myself, I cannot help but wonder: was she autistic too? Was her decline not purely dementia but the fading of a lifelong mask, the exhaustion of cognitive and physical resources for sustaining it any longer?

I have been thinking about her often lately because I have been navigating the worst year of my life. A life I had spent more than a decade building has vaporized for reasons outside of my control, all while I was starting a new job. I had to move house, eradicate my entire routine, and face constant exhaustion while keeping up with the demands of a capitalistic carousel that won’t stop just because I am broken. And every time I cannot cook because my hands won’t respond, every time I cannot shower because the water hurts me, every time I cannot speak for a day because I go non-speaking, I become frightened because I see her in myself. I see myself descending the same steps that brought Maura to her sad end.

Yet, remembering her gives me the oddest consolation. I have been lonely, and she has been in my thoughts more than any living person I know. I imagine meeting her again, exchanging a glance, and reading in her expression that she—someone—knows. What it is like. All of it. The burden. The weight. The sense of doom. The joy. The freedom. No words, no explanations—just understanding.

I cannot nor want to diagnose my grandmother, but I do know that I was lucky to have her in my life. She shaped me in ways I have yet to fully understand. I wish she could know what she has done for me.

My favorite picture of us together is out of focus. And just like that—without words, without explanations—I think it’s the perfect way to represent us both.