My Year With Proust - Day 236

   "I heard the whole of the 'Marquise's' conversation with the keeper," she told me.  "Could anything have been more typical of the Guermantes, or the Verdurins and their little clan? 'Ah! in what courtly terms those things were put!;' And she added, with deliberate application, this from her own special Marquise, Mme de Sevigne: "As I listened to them I thought that they were preparing for me the delights of a farewell."

   Such were the remarks that she addressed to me, remarks into which she had put all her critical delicacy, her love of quotation, her memory of the classics, more thoroughly even than she would normally have done, and as though to prove that she retained possession of all these faculties.  But I guessed rather than heard what she said, so inaudible was the voice in which she mumbled her sentences, clenching her teeth more than could be accounted for the fear of vomiting.

   "Come!" I said lightly enough not to seem to be taking her illness too seriously, "since you're feeling a little sick I suggest we go home.  I don't want to trundle a grandmother with indigestion about the Champs-Elysees."

   "I didn't like to suggest it because of your friends," she replied.  "Poor pet!  But if you don't mind, I think it would be wiser."

   I was afraid of her noticing the strange way in which she uttered these words.

   "Come," I said to her brusquely, "you mustn't tire yourself talking when you're feeling sick - it's silly; wait till we get home."

   She smiled at me sorrowfully and gripped my hand.  She had realised that there was no need to hide from me what I had at once guessed, that she had had a slight stroke.

   We made our way back along the Avenue Gabriel through the strolling crowds.  I left my grandmother to rest on a bench and went in search of a cab.  She, in whose heart I always placed myself in order to form an opinion of the most insignificant person, she was now closed to me, had become part of the external world, and, more than from any casual passer-by, I was obliged to keep from her what I thought of her condition, to betray on sign of my anxiety.  I could not have spoken of it to her with any more confidence than to a stranger.  She had suddenly returned to me the thoughts, the griefs which, from my earliest childhood, I had entrusted to her for all time.  She was not yet dead.  But I was already alone."

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 323

This passage is pretty heartbreaking.  Marcel is out on a walk with his ailing grandmother and at a certain point he realizes that she's had a "slight" stroke.  The situation is made more poignant by the fact that she clearly understands as well, but is more concerned with his feelings than her own condition.  He finds himself trying to hide the fact from her, but in the larger sense he's already starting to isolate her.  "She, in whose heart I always placed myself in order to form an opinion of the most insignificant person, she was now closed to me, had become part of the external world . . ."  When a child is getting ready to leave for college you'll often see an escalation of petty argument, especially with her mother, as both sides subconsciously begin the process of severing the bonds.  I wonder if the same thing happens with the terminally ill?  On the one hand we cling to them more desperately, but on the other they unintentionally start to "become part of the external world."  Proust writes, "She was not yet dead.  But I was already alone."  I'm reflecting on whether or not this happened to me, but truthfully I don't know if I can answer the question.  Partially this is true because when the health of my grandparents began to fail I had already been living in Atlanta for years and thus didn't see them that much anymore, which prevented me from witnessing their decline, and the alteration of my feelings towards them, on a daily basis.  In a sense the same thing happened with my mother's passing; I was up in Vermont and she was living down in Savannah with my sister. However, I think it's more complicated than that.  Truthfully I was never as close to my parents as my siblings were.  Doubtless part of this related to me being a very headstrong and self-possessed (and I guess self-absorbed) oldest child, but part of it related to how they viewed me; in short, it was mutual.  I was utterly devoted to my grandparents.  It seems to me that the real reason why grandparents dote on their grandchildren is that they're not trying to turn them into anything in particular.  Grandparents know that they have a very finite amount of time and so they focus on the wonder of their grandchildren and not their legacy.