I recently celebrated a birthday and my grandmother sent me a sweater as a birthday present. It's a nice sweater, black and soft and fuzzy and with subtle beading and it's totally not me. My grandmother has a long history of sending items of clothing like this for birthdays and christmas - they're nice, but they're almost always things I would never wear. I don't know what to do with them, these clothes that are wrong for me. The obvious solution is to send them along to goodwill, which is the typical destination for my outdated and ill-fitting clothes (ok, I often hang on to the ones that are one size too small in hopes they'll fit again) but it seems like such an unkind thing to do. I think of my grandmother thinking about me, going to the trouble of picking out something nice for me. She lives alone out in the country, and doesn't drive, so I know getting to the shops is something of an effort for her. Disposing of her gifts seems like throwing out her love and good intentions. I know I'm too sentimental, but it still makes me sad.
The whole situation is compounded by the fact that my entire extended family lives in another country. I know my grandparents from visits, but the visits were more frequent when I was younger and less frequent as I got older and I feel like I've never really known them as an adult. One of my grandfathers died when I was 15 - I never knew him as anything other than old and cranky - my sister and I were always a little afraid of him. Another grandfather was killed in WWII. My other grandfather died the summer after I graduated from college - I was sad for much of the summer, sad that I would never really know him, sad that I hadn't seen him for three years.
Sometimes watching the people we love grow old is too hard.
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