On the outskirts of my city in Romania, there is a care home for the elderly called Casa Harmonia, where most residents spend their day in wheelchairs and have lost their minds. I visit them every Tuesday, walking an hour along the Bega river along the nice parts and then the ugly parts, until the asphalt becomes a gravel road and stray dogs yap at my heels, which frightened me at first but they know me now. Most of the residents don’t know me still, even though they see me every week. There is one woman who thinks I am her daughter. Another thinks I am one of the nurses. There is a man who says, to everyone who passes by, impusca-ma, which means ‘shoot me.’ Another resident tells me he fought in the war (unspecified), as if to explain why, in the background, while I play piano, he is begging everyone to kill him. My least favorite is a woman who seems only able to say one word, gata, which depending on context can mean ready or done or shut up, which is why the first time I played piano at Casa Harmonia, I cut off Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 27 No. 2 after the Db major modulation into A major, only 26 bars into the piece, not long enough time to decide you don’t like Chopin.
I am six years old when my grandmother first shows me a catalogue of caskets and tells me she wants a lilac crepe interior, a tombstone that says “în sfârșit s-a terminat” (“finally, it is finished”), and a funeral service where everyone sings, “Unde pot găsi eu pace?” (a Romanian hymn, “Where can I find peace?”).
I call my grandmother every day. We usually have the same conversation. She tells me how she couldn’t sleep because of her high blood pressure and how she has to wash the windows but there are so many of them. Her name is Elena, but our family calls her Mamici (muh-meech). Mamici lives in a house in America that is too big for her; she doesn’t own enough to fill three bedrooms. She seems to enjoy telling me how the dress she is wearing today is older than I am, although she says this gravely, as though it’s something I shouldn’t repeat. The ontological difference between my childhood and hers amazes me: she grew up in Tăcuta, a rural Moldovan village of whitewashed mud houses and wells. Her family were boieri (landowners). She remembers orchards of gutui and plums, walnuts and grapes, apple trees and three kinds of cherry trees. They grew nearly everything they ate. They had more than 100 chickens and it became her job to care for them when she was four years old. I forget sometimes that she knows how to make cheese. My grandmother still gathers dandelions and nettles to dry on her dining room table. When she sees lime trees, she hands me her purse so she can collect linden flowers for tea.
My grandmother was married when she was 16 years old. He was 17. As she often reminds me, by the time she was my age (24), she had seven children. My grandfather was a shepherd boy. He only went to school for three years. I don’t know very much about him because he doesn’t say very much and because they are unhappily married, but my grandmother did tell me once that he wore shoes for the first time when he was 13 years old.
Mamici remembers a lot of her life but that’s because it was very sad. The stories she tells best and most often are the ones that make her cry. She doesn’t as easily remember that she told me yesterday and also the day before that they cut down the big tree in her front yard and now she won’t have walnuts in August.
One of these sad stories is about her father, who refused to support the Communist takeover, and because of this, she was barred from attending school and never advanced beyond the fifth grade. Mamici says she still remembers the day the Communists came and took her father and all his land and crops—except for one large sack of flour, which was slumped behind an open door. Mamici says that was the only reason they didn’t starve that winter.
I ask her where they took her father or what they did to him. She says she doesn’t know. He was gone for four years and they thought he was dead until one day he reappeared in time for dinner. He never mentioned the Communists, and no one ever asked.
At Casa Harmonia, people forget me from one visit to the next. A man tells me he fought in a war but can’t remember which one. A woman who thinks I’m her daughter holds my hand with both of hers and cries when I say I have to leave. It’s not just names and dates that disappear—it’s the order of things, the sense that yesterday is connected to today. What does it mean to care for memory when it is no longer able to care for itself? Memory doesn’t empty all at once. It takes its time. One man forgets his name but still hums cântece bătrânești (these are traditional epic ballads, literally “songs of the elders”). Another forgets where he is but folds his napkin after every meal, like he’s done his whole life. My grandmother, who sometimes loses track of her thoughts mid-sentence and forgets that we called yesterday, still knows which plants are good for cramps and reminds me to collect red clover in June.
The thing I am afraid of most is losing my mind. My grandmother seems to remember everything she wishes she could forget and to forget everything she wishes she could remember.
One Tuesday, it’s someone’s birthday and they serve albinuță (honey cake) on flimsy paper plates and play traditional Romanian music at an aggressive volume. The song, which is meant for dancing the hora, only exaggerates the lifelessness of the room. Have a slice of cake. Okay. Sit here. Okay. I take in the vacant stares and sagged bodies, the wheelchairs lined up like abandoned furniture, some elders complaining that the music is too soft and some complaining that the music is too loud. They were all once mothers and fathers, needed, the sources of life, now abandoned to decay as if time itself has declared them unnecessary. Maybe that’s why I keep going back to Casa Harmonia.
My grandmother is on Instagram and her algorithm feeds her the kind of health accounts I worry are spreading misinformation. Sometimes she sends me screenshots of posts saying things like, “okra water prevents chronic diseases” or “ginger is 10,000x more effective at killing cancer than chemo.” I tell her maybe she should spend less time on her phone. She says, doing what? She has been scared to use the car recently because everyone on the road drives like they could kill her. I ask her how her plants are doing. She takes me to the garden to see but she doesn’t know how to flip the camera on FaceTime so I don’t actually see anything. In the winter, Mamici tucks her potted plants in at night like children and hauls them back outside by morning with the devotion of a full-time caregiver. She talks to the herbs on her windowsill. She grieves the tree in her front yard as though it were a person.
About the Author:
Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, Josephine Quarterly, Meniscus Literary Journal, and Stanford University’s Mantis among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.
Feature image by Dynamic Wang on Unsplash