what a terrible year this has been

se fue mi abuela

Apologies for being maudlin on Christmas Eve, but what a bad year. I've never written a eulogy before. I'm not sure how to start one, but I can't say I love it. It feels impossible to write in the past tense about someone who still feels so viscerally here, presently. But my grandmother died on Tuesday, so here we are. 

I know the vast majority of you did not know my grandma (sucks for all of you, honestly), but it feels impossible — yes, this too — to not acknowledge her passing here, and I cannot do it as an aside in a newsletter about the Kardashians (although she would probably love that). So I will tell you all that my beloved grandmother, Anita to most and Ana Maria to my grandpa, left us this week after an aggressive battle with a born-again cancer. She was 77. 

My grandma was more adventurous than me, than you, than any of us. I saw so many places for the first time with her. She wanted to see everything. We went to Rome by ourselves when I was nine years old (because my parents are insane), and we roamed the quiet streets of early May, spending more time lost than found. She didn't speak Italian and I was too proud, even as a child, to ask for directions. I was a very preoccupied child, but my grandma was the epitome of unconcerned, and the energy was contagious.

She paused at the top of every "charming side street" to take photos, ideally with me in them. I would say with a high degree of certainty that 97% of the Roman streets we passed ended up being charming side streets. By the end of our trip she had developed hundreds of pictures of nondescript streets that she would never in her life be able to identify, but she'd confidently tell me "como no, si en esa callecita es donde nos comimos un gelato!" (reader, we had gelato approximately five times a day). It was a perfect trip. 

Have you ever seen a more glamorously unbothered woman? Note the clenched map in my hands — a very one-sided concern.

I left Uruguay when I was eight years old, and on every return visit, my brother and I bugged my grandma constantly. A day without seeing her was a day wasted. It didn’t matter what we did. We were never bored of each other, probably because I am more of an old lady than she ever was. We would spend hours in the afternoon playing gin rummy in her living room ("abuela, estás para un rummy??" was a question my brother and I asked on an everyday basis up to our most recent visit this last July, to an overwhelmingly positive response), and while drinking coffee in her tiny cups we'd talk about how my grandpa, before he died, never let us win, and how she always let my brother win. Reader, I was in a very unfavorable spot, cards-wise. But it didn't much matter. We kept playing.

There are so many things I could write about my grandma — how the phone at her house never stopped ringing, because everyone wanted to talk with her; how much she loved sitting outside by the pool, inspecting her garden; how she loved pretending that everyone got along at family gatherings; how she loved french fries and toast with a cheese-thick layer of butter and was somehow shocked she had high cholesterol; how she read the fanfiction I wrote in middle school even though it was, I’m quite sure, the most cringey collection of words that has ever been written; how our video calls could last hours, even if most of the time she could only manage to show me the top of her forehead — but mostly, I was just very lucky to have shared so much of my life with hers. It feels particularly cruel to lose her just before Christmas, but very on brand for this fantastically awful year. I’ll miss her all the time.