Grandma’s Hands

My grandma just passed away. She was born in Kiev in 1933 and lived to 91 years old.

She saw Nazi warplanes fly above Ukraine and saw her neighbors cheer for their arrival. Her family evacuated before the Battle of Kiev, but her grandmother decided to stay in their house and was killed in the Babi Yar massacre in ‘41.

She is one of very few people who have been with me my entire life, a consistent, permanent presence. For her to disappear, permanently, is a world-changing shift. This is fundamentally and substantively a different world.

But I’ve been so stressed with work and life that when I first got the news, it only registered as another dollop of anxiety, a flash of sadness, on an already heavy load. The world changed dramatically, but my mind and soul only budged marginally, if painfully. The asymmetry between what’s happening on the outside and what’s resonating on the inside was disorienting.

I felt walled off. It felt like less important stimuli were saturating my circuits, blocking them from fully resonating with this fundamental, spiritual change in the world I live in.

I often wish I had two of me to do things out in the world — to spend time with more people in my life, to work on more important projects, to have more meaningful experiences. I feel that again now, but in a very unique way: I wish I had two of me, so I could feel more. I wish I had an entire consciousness that could be rightfully dedicated to mourning, to reflecting this dramatic shift on the outside, inside. But I’m stuck with this one brain and it’s saturated with these materialistic worries and sorrows, and the deeper, spiritual shifts seem to have far less space to resonate than they deserve.

I know my mind is processing it more deeply, at least. I was telling my roommate joyfully about my grandma’s life, about her husband, about her dementia, and I would feel these instantaneous throbs of sadness, and then suddenly cry a few times, and then continue as I was, wiping the tears away. And then back to work.

It’s another reminder of the transience I hate in the world. If I can’t be fully present for her passing, this lodestone of my lineage, then how can I expect anyone else in my life to fully resonate with me, a minor character in their lives. It makes me reaffirm my own presence for my parents, my brother, and my friends, but also fear if this kind of partial presence is a practical limit of being alive, no matter what I wish.

Maybe the challenge is to find contentment in a world like this: the only real lodestone is hashem, or the trinity, or the breath. But it’s easier said than done, and I still feel my heart clawing for permanence.

At the funeral, I shoveled two heavy mounds of dirt over her coffin, deep in the grave. Everyone shoveled a little. In a world of AI and nanobots, the theatrics end, the curtains close, the actors return to the earth. But even now, she’s still animated in my mind’s eye, and I can’t bear to call my last memory of her the final act.

She was a proud intellectual, loved the opera, and was the only woman in her class at the structural engineering institute in Kiev. Many engineers professed their love to her.

In the 70s, she moved to Toronto with my dad and grandpa. She eventually married Klaus Kiessling, a German electrical engineering professor in Etobicoke whom I loved dearly. She was always proud of civilizing a German man.

She took me to the Scooby Doo 2 live action movie at my local theater in 2004, and the production company intro before the movie scared me so much that I had to run out:

As she got older and frailer, she would visit less. The last few years, she got dementia and I saw her more sparsely. Last year, I tried to visit her every few months in Toronto.

She would sway between remembering and having no idea who I was. Sometimes I would confront her in broken Russian,

“Вера, как бы ты себя чувствовала, если бы твоя бабушка забыла, кто ты? Ты думаешь, я тоже забуду имя своих внуков? Это очень страшно, ты знаешь.”

“Vera, how would you feel if your own grandmother forgot who you were? Do you think I’ll also forget my grandchildren’s name? That’s pretty scary you know.”

and she would just say,

“Какая разница, помню ли я твое имя? Я смотрю на тебя и чувствую любовь.”

“Why does it matter if I remember your name? I look at you, and I feel love.”

Rest in Peace Vera Kiessling

September 30, 1933 — June 2, 2025

Daughter of Aaron Mordukhovich and Liza Polonsky

First married to Yura Petrovich Tsesis

Finally married to Klaus Kiessling

Sister of 2 brothers, Sasha and Victor

Half-sister of 9 through her father

Mother of Euvgeny Yuravich

Grandmother of Andrew and Oliver

Great-grandmother of Luca and Roman