When I was 24, I traveled to India and had a hard time of it. There were canceled flights in Delhi, a trip to a tiny hospital in Kerala and a rickshaw ride next to a man holding a very large rifle in Agra. When I came home, shaken and sporting stitches in one leg (not from the rifle), I gallantly told everyone about my adventure, about how challenging the travel had been and how much I’d been through.
One acquaintance who was forced to listen to me had just returned from her own trip to India. She could not relate to my experience.
“Oh,” she said, kindly but matter-of-factly. “I didn’t find traveling there difficult at all.”
This was my boyfriend’s grandmother, Lottie, then 79 years old.
I had met her a few times before and knew that she was daring, a seasoned world traveler, unfazed by all manner of catastrophe. Born in 1930, she had the requisite ensuing disposition: frugal, industrious, calm, bordering on stoic. I, meanwhile, was a millennial with a lot of feelings.
Somehow, we became dear friends.
It started with conversations at family Christmas celebrations and Fourth of July parties, where I often felt out of place among my boyfriend Dave’s big, tight-knit family. Lottie told me stories about hiking to Machu Picchu, and she seemed to actually understand the short fiction in each week’s New Yorker. I aspired to both of these things but had managed to pull off neither as a floundering 20-something.
We shared a love of novels, a preference for rare steak and an insistence on walking everywhere. Even in her 80s, she had no need for taxis when we met up in New York City. If the weather was really terrible, she might agree to the subway or bus.
Dave and I got engaged, and Lottie and I took up a written correspondence. This got awkward as it became evident that I was not writing my other future in-laws similarly long, scrawling letters, but Lottie and I had a lot to discuss. There were our trips to Vietnam, closely timed again; museums we had been to or would like to see; Broadway shows Lottie managed to attend at suspiciously deep discounts, thanks to some mystery senior citizen deal.
I loved that we did not share blood, that our relationship was a choice, that matters of genes or old familial grudges were not really our problem. We were soon bound by my marriage, but our connection continued to feel like a surprise to me, a lucky, random gift of intergenerational connection that had been dropped into my life.
I learned how she had been born prematurely — at a time when that was often a death sentence — and saved by a benevolent doctor. How she spent her early days in an incubator on Coney Island, part of a sideshow. How she was orphaned at age eight.
When I lost a pregnancy, she took me to the ballet, never addressing the reason I looked teary-eyed, but sitting with me just the same. When my son, her first great-grandchild, was born, she came to visit immediately, holding the tiny baby in her arms for hours.
The next year, Dave and I had a daughter, a preemie just like Lottie had been. We named her Louisa. In the Jewish tradition, babies are named after relatives who have died, and so when we called Lottie to tell her we’d chosen a middle name to honor her beloved late husband, I thought she’d be very moved.
“That’s nice,” she said. Then, with far more feeling: “I like to think the ‘L’ in Louisa is for Lottie.”
She was forthright in that way older generations often are. At a certain point, I suppose you just decide to say what you mean.
My friend Tracey, whose family seems nearly impervious to death, lost her beloved great-grandmother when Tracey was in medical school. Button Nanny, as they called her, was 102 and a half.
“It was a shock,” Tracey said of Button Nanny’s death. “So sudden.”
At the time I thought Tracey was insane, but I came to understand. Who doesn’t hope it will go on forever, one birthday after another?
At 91, Lottie sold her house on Long Island and moved to an independent living facility upstate. She did quite well, until she didn’t. At the hospital, they would often ask her to recite her name and the year, to gauge her cognitive health. Once, during President Trump’s second term, a doctor asked her who the president was.
“I prefer not to say his name,” she responded.
Dave and I visited, bringing photo albums from our recent travels with the kids. We paged through them together and pushed her wheelchair around a garden. Back home, I called as regularly as ever, but increasingly she wasn’t well enough to pick up. By Lottie’s bedside, Dave’s aunt read my text messages aloud to her.
She died last month, at age 95, surrounded by her four children.
Her legacy includes 14 grandchildren, 10 great-grandchildren and me. I have now discovered what so many already know: that it is a heartbreak to lose a friend, at any age, no matter how much borrowed time you feel you’ve had.
The day after Lottie died, my mother-in-law mentioned she’d been listening to old voice mail messages from Lottie. As someone born after 1965, I generally ignore the existence of voice mail messages, deleting them indiscriminately whenever I need to free up space. But I touched the phone icon, just to see what I might have.
Miraculously, here was Lottie’s voice, preserved in the digital ether, message after message. Some were quotidian products of phone tag. One was a joyful comparison of the Bobbsey Twins books, which she loved as a child, and the Betsy-Tacy books, which I loved as a child.
And then there was one that started ordinarily enough, but ended like this:
“When you get a chance, give me a call,” she said in her familiar lilt. “Because I literally love talking to you.”
I played it over and over again, grateful tears dripping down my cheeks. I felt just the same.
Rachel Feintzeig is a journalist at work on a book about staring down 40.
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