What Remains
BY FILIZ FISH
There is a quiet ache in my grandparents’ home, a house of thin oak and chipped paint. The floorboards splinter underfoot, pricking unsocked feet. As a child, I’d sit on those floors, tracing the grain, letting my nails follow the loops and spirals until I grew dizzy, as if I might peel back the years, the rings of wood revealing childhood Christmases stacked like strata beneath the surface.
They were the kind of Christmases plucked from the TV screen—glossy colors and sugar-dusted nostalgia. A chubby pine swollen with water weight and memories, its branches tangled with bright, uneven ornaments we made when my brother and I were small enough to fumble over glue sticks and glitter. My grandmother placed these crude creations above the store-bought baubles and porcelain spheres. She could never choose just one to be the star, so she clustered them at the top, made them kings, exalted them to the highest rank in the holiday hierarchy.
They were a sacred kind of Christmas—perfect, snow-topped pictograms of the day.
I watched my grandmother’s face crease into a smile as we walked through the door each season. She would curl her arms around me and ask about school and tussle my hair, reminding me I was young and cared for as my world in L.A. melted away. My grandfather liked to mill about the house, stumbling into interactions rather than initiating them himself. He was reserved, my dad liked to say. But always there, laughing quietly at every bad pun and forced punchline. His love was soft, a faint strum of familial strings.
We visited my father’s parents every December—looked forward to it, even. But, the year I turned fourteen, we stopped visiting my grandparents and began a new tradition: skiing in places like Aspen and Whistler, eating room service dinners, and forgetting about our family on the East Coast.
It was a gradual erasure, a soft closing of the door on their lives. We forgot to check in, to pay attention to the pain sprouting behind the wood.
I turned fifteen, then sixteen, and I began to know my grandparents through whispered discussions between my mother and father. I heard my grandmother’s voice bleeding through phone calls to my father as he helped her find a doctor for my grandfather. I learned to read my father’s back once he hung up—to string each tense and muscle together, to watch the news settle into his bones.
When I finally saw my grandmother again—in the summer this time—I realized how small she’d become, how small she had always been. Hugging her felt dangerous, her limbs ready to shatter like porcelain under excess weight.
I couldn’t help but notice the silence.
We knew that if we spoke, we would have to mention how my grandfather choked on the syllables of my name—the helpless confusion glazing over his eyes as he failed to dissect his own DNA. I would have to confess that we dreaded this trip because we couldn’t swallow the sadness that had invaded their home, the smell of Christmas dissipating into something sterile.
We didn’t talk because no one talks about anything serious in my father’s family; in small-town America, no one discusses illness and regret over the dinner table. My grandmother, who refuses to say “hate” or “stupid,” didn’t use words like Alzheimer’s or dementia; she developed a quiet system. I found post-it notes stuck on objects around the house, reminders printed across each: “Brush your teeth,” “Take the blue pill first,” “This isn’t yours.” No one talked about them. But they were everywhere.
She tried to contain the pain—wrangle it by scheduling her days and regimenting her life—but it spread and spilled and crashed into her more than she liked. It leaked out through soft sobs in the shower and the weariness on her face.
My dad made spaghetti on the last night of our visit—something special, he said. We were setting the table, and my grandmother reached for something in the cabinet, straining her limbs and then laughing softly—a frail, tinny noise like the sound of fracturing glass.
“You know, I’m not quite as strong as your annane1. Especially with these bones of mine.”
The words strained and stretched until they fell easily from her tongue. We heard her throat unclog, relax from expelling what had laid dormant in her chest all these years. We laughed, but it felt shallow. The laughter felt wrong because she was right—not that she was inherently weaker than my other grandmother, but that her name oozes with pity while our annane stars in anecdotes and stories.
My family dotes on my mother’s mother because she survived coups and poverty and loss and still manages to plow her garden each day. She towers over life despite her years, cutting through time with the vigor of a twenty-year-old—challenging my cousins to arm wrestling competitions and filling each room with the timbre of her voice.
“She’s the strongest woman I know,” my father likes to say.
We live much closer to my father’s family than my mother’s, yet they are always kept at a distance. My family lives in America—my father is American and my skin runs paler than many of my friends—but our household has always been grounded in the Turkish side. Nazarlar2 consume the walls, and we use Turkish to say our please’s and thank you’s, our hello’s and goodbye’s. It’s an implicit fact reigning our home that our Turkish roots are the relevant ones—the ones that matter.
It’s been the case since before I existed, from the moment my parents reached across the Atlantic and found each other. My father married my mother knowing his life would fall between the cracks, that he would never be the interesting one. He grew up on the sidelines of the city—flew on a plane for the first time in eleventh grade—so when he met a woman from the other side of the universe, from a culture so alien to his, he couldn’t help but grow obsessed—marvel at each novelty.
So his children stood in awe beside him. I’m a writer, yet I never write about my father’s side of the family because I assumed suburban Massachusetts was too plain. I’ve explored every facet of my Middle Eastern side—written poems and stories and memoirs about my mother and her mother, about my time spent by the Black Sea. I’m the humble character in each piece, the spoiled girl who learns to appreciate her privilege. I am the weak one.
But things are different with my grandmother, my father’s mother. There’s something different about her pain, at least to us. We visit Turkey, and every room fills with laughter and jokes.
Conversation ebbs and flows—crescendos and softens. There’s a liveliness, an indestructible joy that clings to the cobblestone and terracotta. We’ve entered the homes of widows—of refugees and fishermen—but we’ve never walked into silence, into sadness. Quiet doesn’t exist in Istanbul.
So we look at our grandmother’s pain and see the way it consumes her
My mother hates the concept of wasted pain—of running marathons just to feel something. It’s an American thing, she says, our gravitation towards synthetic hardship. She hates that we put ourselves in situations to sweat and gripe when people across the world can’t escape their suffering—quit after mile 20 and go home without worrying again. She can’t help but wonder why my grandmother won’t put my grandfather in a home, why she won’t hire help. Why she insists on watching her husband turn into a stranger. It’s a unique, amalgamated feeling—a mixture of confusion and sympathy and impatience.
We turn away from my grandfather and his illness—how that illness has upended my grandmother’s life—because it’s ugly. We need the comeback, the redemption—for the main character to scale the mountain after hitting rock bottom. We want my grandmother to be like our annane—to be indifferent to the trauma, to let it fuel her for the better. But my grandmother is not the kind of woman to hold life by the throat, to make beauty from her pain.
She lets it swallow her.
There is no language for what happens when love curdles, when devotion becomes a slow suffocation. When caring becomes caretaking. Her days blur into a series of small tasks, each hour spent dreading the next. So I watch her shrink—not physically, but into herself. The way she repeats the same questions, the way her voice falters as she reminds my grandfather who he is, like it’s the last thing tethering him to this world. And maybe it is. Maybe she believes that if she stops, if she lets go, he will disappear completely, and so will she.
She will become a ghost of herself, and we’ll mourn her in silence, remembering her for her sadness until we forget her altogether.
¹ Mother’s mother in Turkish
² Evil eyes
