Most people who’ve known me for a while know how close I am (or was?) with my grandparents. For the first eight years of my life, I didn’t really know them outside of the occasional email, which mostly contained stuff like “Do you like Dosa, Love ammamma.” But in the years that followed, they were my everything.
In 5th standard, everybody in class was asked to write about which parent they liked more and why (why do schools do this?). I wrote about how my parents were chill, but my Ammamma and Ammachan were the best. My mom was told about this at the next parent-teacher meeting, and she still brings it up. I spent all my weekends and summer vacations with them, as a teen and well into being a young adult. I truly did have the best time with them.
But this post isn’t about that.
Ammachan
My grandad loved telling me stories about what an athlete he’d been in his time, but I’d rarely ever seen him exercise in all the years I knew him. My grandparents were big people, both their hearts and their bodies, for most of the time I’ve known them. They were all about trying new food and feeding everybody around them. That was their love language. Till date, my grandmother rolls her eyes when anybody says no while she’s trying to serve them more food, hahaha.
My grandfather passed away at the end of 2022, after years of fighting something or the other. I joke that you name a disease, and my grandad has had it and fought it. Cancer. A stroke. A heart attack. Cataracts. A knee replacement. A blood clot in his brain. Diabetes. Kidney problems. At one point, while he was going through chemo, the man tested positive for Covid.
He fought all of it, for the longest time. Not because he was physically strong, he wasn’t clearly lol, but because of an immense mental strength, and of course top-class medical care, thanks to having two doctor kids and ECHS coverage.
And through all of it, my grandmother stood beside him with a smile. She nursed him back to health again and again, while her own health was nothing to boast about either. I think we were all so hyper-focused on Ammachan that it was only after he passed that we finally took notice of Ammamma, of how much her health had quietly deteriorated while she was busy taking care of his. The mobility issues. The blood pressure. The Parkinson’s. The vertigo. The list kept growing.
The thing I kept telling myself
This is starting to read like a sad story about my grandparents, and that’s not what I’m going for. What I’m trying to say is this: every time I held one of their hands through all of it, in hospital corridors, in waiting rooms, through recoveries, I kept telling myself the same thing.
I don’t want this for myself. Ever.
People who knew me pre-2022 know I was never an athletic kid. My ten seconds of fame in school came from winning events nobody else signed up for, like Sanskrit poem recitation or versification. On sports day, I’d play badminton, and that’d be the end of it. I wasn’t the person who defined her life around sport or physical activity. If you’d told teenage me that one day my weekends would be planned around runs, she’d have assumed you had the wrong girl.
What changed wasn’t a race, or a resolution, or a crisis. It was watching Ammamma. Watching a woman who kept showing up for everybody else, every single day, except herself, until her body presented her with the bill, all at once, with interest.
At 84, she’s trying
The part that gets me is that Ammamma is trying now. I know she is. At 84, she optimises for protein despite her vegetarian diet, and starts her day with a protein supplement. She tries to do some home exercises, though on most days her body gives up on her after twenty metres of walking. Whenever I’m in town, she tries her best to be enthusiastic and alive, and within an hour she’s exhausted and needs to rest.
Last week when I went home, she told me she wished she’d done the right things earlier. That she wished she’d known, earlier, what her body actually needed from her. She’d thought staying active with housework would keep her healthy forever, that being on her feet all day for other people counted. It didn’t, not the way she needed it to.
Nobody else will, and nobody else can
Most people have to take it on faith that the small daily work of moving your body, eating right, and going for the check-ups you keep postponing actually adds up to something. I don’t have to take it on faith. I’ve seen what not doing the work does. I watched it up close, for years, in the two people I loved most.
And the pattern I watched isn’t unique to my grandparents. So many people spend decades putting everything ahead of their own health, postponing it because something else always feels more urgent, until the postponing runs out.
Every time I’m travelling and meet people, mostly Europeans well into their 70s, out seeing the world and doing the same strenuous activities as me, I think about Ammamma and Ammachan. How this could’ve been them. And if it couldn’t be them, I want it to be me.
My health is the one thing nobody else will manage for me, and honestly, the one thing nobody else can. No amount of doctor kids or good coverage or people who love you can retrofit decades of putting yourself last. The showing up has to be done by me, now, in the boring unglamorous years when nothing is wrong yet.
But Ammamma said it better than I ever could. You’re lucky, she told me. Keep up with your lifestyle. It’s easy to do all this when you’re single and live alone. Life will throw stuff at you, and it won’t always be this simple. Keep it up anyway, because nobody else can do it for you.
So that’s the real answer to why I run, why I train, why I’ve become the person who eats thinking in protein terms. It’s not discipline, and it’s not vanity. It’s two people I loved more than anything, and a promise I kept making silently while holding their hands.