Starting Over at 83

The first time I saw it, I was twelve years old: our whole family had taken a trip to Playa del Carmen to celebrate our grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary. We were about to miss our plane back home when my grandparents began to separate from the group. I decided to wait for them to guide them to the gate. The image of my grandad raising his hand to her and then slowly lowering it while realizing he was in public will be forever etched in my mind. If they had been alone, he would have hit her.

I started to ask myself: why didn't she leave him?

It took her three years to gather the courage to leave after she found out about his infidelity. In that time, I saw my grandma for the first time ever as a person, not the cozy figure of grandmother that disappears into the back of your mind the moment you go home. I didn't see her as the woman in an ivory tower with piles of money, but the scared 22-year-old she was when she left her home in London to Mexico, an unknown land that would always see her as other, no matter how much she tried. As the girl without a penny to her name and no one to support her; living off conditional love from her husband's family that could vanish at a moment's notice.

When you live through 60 years of abuse and they tell you it's love, apples do start tasting like oranges. I know she thought he loved her, and I know that the abuse had calmed down until the affairs were revealed. While she has never talked to me about it, I've pressed my ear to enough doors to hear the words "pushed" and "bruises." She endured all that, and more.

The final straw was when he tried to bully her into not talking to both her daughters and grandchildren. Her own suffering was fine, but she drew the line at her family. Maybe it was because she never had a family that protected her, but she wanted to protect us. And my mom and aunt, her daughters, wanted nothing more than to protect their mom; so on one of their secret phone calls, they started planning the escape.

I can't imagine the nervousness my grandma had to have felt at that moment. She was leaving her whole life behind, a handful of clothes and some sentimental items that she couldn't bear to part with. How does one decide what's important enough to take and what to leave knowing it will probably get destroyed by a rage-filled man that night?

She boarded the plane to New York toward a new life where she would live alone for the first time in her life; no one to give her money, no one to pay the bills or plan her life for her. Two years later, my 83-year-old grandma is someone new. She excitedly shows me her calendar and tells me that she's going to a strength training class; she talks about her new friends and the man she had a meet-cute with in the tailor shop near her new apartment. She tells me about her aimless walks around the park, no curfew or monster to answer to; all of this she says with levity I've never heard before. I have the pleasure of meeting her true self each day, without fear or retribution.