My mother never allowed me to have sleepovers at friends’ houses, but she always let me stay at my grandmother’s. While it was frustrating to miss out on sleepovers with my friends, I loved spending the night at my grandmother’s house.
I called her “medz mama” which is Armenian for “older mother”. I used to think she liked me the most out of all her grandkids, she always smiled the brightest when she saw me, and I could see her eyes twinkling behind her yellow-tinted glasses.
Her house felt like a pocket of magic. The air always smelled faintly of spices and an apple pie baking in the oven; because it was my favourite. Her living room was cluttered with soft pillows, books, and knickknacks she refused to throw away as much as my mom asked her to because it was “too much”. But I loved them. Every time I stayed over, we turned the night into a little adventure. We would watch Survivor and laugh at things I only half-understood, then pull out a deck of tarot cards and pretend to read each other’s futures. She always made mine sound full of mystery and hope.
Sometimes we played cards, sometimes we just talked. She made up stories on the spot and they always left me amazed. She never made things feel like bedtime was a rule; it was more like a gentle suggestion we both ignored until our yawns caught up to us. I would crawl into my bed while watching her put her glasses on the side table, before sleeping.
I loved her glasses, they had silver sides, slightly round frames with yellow screens. It matched perfectly with her hazel eyes. It was part of her. It made me want one of my own.
Since middle school, I would always try to fake being short-sighted just so I could wear glasses. I would stand in front of the Tumbling E chart and pretend I could see nothing. But my scheming never worked.
A couple of years later, when I got my first job, I noticed I could not read what the screen monitor said. Turns out, my vision really was starting to blur. And when you are working at Burger King, you need to pay close attention to whether a customer wants pickles on their burger or not.
So, I finally got a pair of glasses.
When my medz mama died, I could not attend her funeral. I was living in Armenia, and she was in Lebanon. It felt strange to not be there with my family who were all gathering to say goodbye to someone who I loved very much.
I remember sitting on my bed when I heard the news, holding my phone, not quite sure what to do with all the pain and the guilt building up because I could not say goodbye for the very last time. But before my mom left for the funeral, I called her and asked if she could bring me back one thing. Just one. I did not need clothes or jewelry or anything big. I just wanted her yellow-tinted glasses.
When my mother brought them back they were in a case. I did not open it and just placed it on my bookshelf. I could not stomach looking at them. I had developed complicated grief (CG), which is a condition characterized by recurrent distressing emotions, avoidance of reminders, and intrusive thoughts about the loss of a loved one. The reason why I loved those glasses so much was because it was something that belonged to her.
What the object represents depends on the context, and it’s only the owner who can really tell us more about what it means to them and any associated experiences or relationships the object might be connected to. Like they were a part of her. Not in the ordinary way something belongs to someone, but like they were one of her limbs. Like a heart. Fragile like the real one, but golden. And now, somehow, they belonged to me.
The glasses are harder to look at than a photo of a video. Photos are just paper you can tuck away. Videos can be paused, turned off. But the glasses? One day they were resting on the bridge of her nose, and the next they did not have a face to hold anymore. They carried a different kind of weight.
It took me over two years to accept her passing. No one had taught me how to grieve, and since I was not in Lebanon, it was easy to convince myself she was still alive and well.
There are five stages of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) but I was just stuck in denial for a very long time. Denial is a defense mechanism that helps minimize the pain of the loss. It’s our brain’s way of protecting us from the pain so we have some time to adjust to our new reality.
But I thank myself every day for making the whimsical decision to ask my mother to bring back the glasses with her. Even when I had not processed the meaning of “your medz mama passed away last night” at that moment.
I wear my own glasses now. They are not yellow-tinted, and they do not have the same shape, but somehow, I feel a connection with her through them. One of my biggest fears was that I would end up forgetting what she looked or sounded like, but when I look at those yellow-tinted glasses just sitting there on my bookshelf, I remember her smile, her kindness, her voice as she sang to me while she grated apples to bake me an apple pie, the way she adjusted her glasses as she read the grocery store list when we went shopping, and most importantly, the love she had for me.
