The Story of My Beloved Grandmother
My grandmother is 90 years old.
She has plenty of health concerns here and there, but she’s living at home with help from my parents. As a nurse, I can tell she’s remarkably healthy and sharp for her age — she’s a grandmother I truly admire and love.
I Want to Take Her Out, But
As her granddaughter, I keep thinking, She has the time, and she’s still able to move around — I want to take her out somewhere!
But she herself says things like, I don’t need to go out anymore, or I’m too old for that now.
In Japan, it’s fairly common for elderly parents and grandparents to downplay their own wishes like this, out of a cultural instinct not to be a burden on anyone — and families often respond with caution rather than encouragement.
I’ve never been her age, so I can’t fully understand how she feels, not 100%…
But even so, it feels like such a waste to have the ability to do something and just not do it!
If she can sit for long stretches at home, then she can sit in a wheelchair too — I want to travel somewhere together!
I keep thinking we should do it before the day actually comes when she truly can’t anymore, but it’s been genuinely hard to get my family on board, including my own parents.
The only ones who get it are my younger brother and my husband.
As I kept turning over the question of how do I get this across to them? … I found myself wondering something more basic: why do I want so badly to take my grandmother out in the first place?
Tracing my own memory back, I realized it all started with a psychiatric clinical placement I did back when I was a nursing student.
The Experience That Started It All
My Psychiatric Ward Placement
The patient had come from a difficult family situation since childhood and had developed a mental illness at a young age. She’d been hospitalized in a psychiatric ward since her twenties — more than 40 years by that point.
In Japan, long-term psychiatric hospitalization like this is still far more common than in many other countries — in fact, Japan has the longest average psychiatric hospital stay of any developed country, at close to a year, compared to, for example, roughly a week in the US or around a month in Germany.
She’d already been at the specific hospital where I did my placement for more than 20 years.
I was 20 years old at the time of my placement.
Realizing that this woman had been living there since before I was even born left me with a feeling too complicated to put into a single word.
Not as a nursing student, but simply as one human being to another — I desperately tried to think of something I could do for her.
My placement happened to fall right during cherry blossom season.
She was someone who, if I so much as said hello to introduce myself, would pull the covers over her head and not come out for hours. Even so, I wanted her to see the cherry blossoms in the hospital garden somehow. I knew it was a long shot, but I decided to make that my goal for the placement and started reaching out.
The Hanami We Made Happen in Two Weeks
Only two weeks, but that’s still 10 days.
I greeted her every day, kept a little distance while watching over her meals…
Little by little, she started letting me push her wheelchair… and then, finally!
When I asked, Would you like to go see the cherry blossoms? she murmured, I’d like that…
I was so overjoyed my heart was practically dancing, and I ran straight to the nurses’ station to report it.
The three of us — her, my clinical instructor, and me — walked together under the cherry blossoms.
I’ll never forget the way she looked up, her eyes shining, saying, It’s beautiful, it’s really beautiful.
How much hardship must she have been through. Was there really no other path her life could have taken?
From someone who’d been dwelling on all of this history, I came out thinking, There’s something I can do, and “t’s not too late, even now.
What I Want to Share
Step Outside, and Your Heart Starts Moving
What I’m trying to say is this…
I believe that instead of looking for reasons why you can’t do something, you should first find the thing you actually want to try, and then figure out what you can do to make it happen.
No matter how old you are, no matter your situation, even if it doesn’t work out perfectly — there’s meaning in taking some kind of action.
And just by stepping outside, you naturally look up to see the cherry blossoms, and your heart moves, thinking, “how beautiful.”
And once your heart starts moving, I think the body starts to follow.
Worry Is Preparation, Not a Reason to Stop
There’s no end to the list of things you could worry about, and worrying certainly does help you prepare. But what actually ends up happening is rarely what you worried about — it’s usually something unexpected instead. And even if you do nothing at all, something is going to happen anyway.
So I think it’s such a waste to use worry as a reason not to try something.
What Can I Do, Right Now?
Thinking all of this through, it occurred to me that there are probably a lot of people out there wrestling with the same kind of hesitation, needing courage to take that first step.
If you’ve ended up here on this blog, I hope you’ll find the courage to take that step.
I don’t know what your situation is, but I want you to try acting on what your heart actually wants.
Maybe that means just making a reservation first, and figuring out the rest later.
Maybe it means reaching out to someone.
It doesn’t have to be something as big as a trip — it could be as simple as buying something you’d normally never choose.
Or wearing it, even just once. No matter how small it seems, those little steps should add up into real change.
The Heart Is Always Free
Whatever you do, it’s your own life.
Even when your body can’t move the way you want it to, your heart should always be free to.
I hope this piece can give someone, somewhere, a gentle push forward.
Thank you so much for reading all the way to the end.
