Phyllis— a name you’d only give a girl in 1928. it comes from the greek for foliage, because Phyllis was a Thracian princess who was promised a husband that never came. she died of a broken heart and was turned into an almond tree.
my grandmother is nothing like that.
she was never very loving. or nice. but she was always generous. she came to hundreds of my sporting events, including 8th grade girls flag football. from my memory, the town i lived in only had one girls team to play against. phyllis took photographs of all three of our games. she’d sit at my water polo and swim meets bundled in parkas when it was 65 degrees out and snap long lens shots that were never great, but always appreciated.
Above: 2009 water polo match — phyllis always finding my best angles
she is an introvert but endlessly curious. she and my grandfather traveled the world together. there was a framed photo of them with the Dalai Lama above her dinner table. she had dozens of binders of print outs that she made for herself to learn new things, through her 90s she continued this. usually, they were wikipedia pages about buddhism and philosophy.
she didn’t like me much until i started studying philosophy in college. i think because she didn’t like my mother? it’s hard to say and doesn’t matter.
Above: Phyllis’ books and binders of research.
she taught me about photography mostly by giving me her old film camera when i was 11 and telling me it was “not the future” but i could use it if i wanted. it was my future, much to everyone’s chagrin.
Above: January 27th, 2024 — Celebrating her 96th birthday, I gave her a collection of my film photography.
her husband bob died 5 years ago from alzheimer’s which prompted my father to get the whole family 23andMe tests to see if any of us have “the gene.” turns out, bob didn’t have the gene. phyllis did. and she never got it. it makes me think about the information age, and how even “finding things out” perhaps doesn’t serve us at all.
i never saw anything i would call love between her and bob. especially in the last ten years of his life. she would have had an entirely different life if she was born half a century later and i think that was part of her distaste for me. she would have been on sports teams and in arts programs and traveling the world alone, like i do. but she wasn’t allowed to. she was a jewish teenager during world war 2. she was bitter. and she’s still bitter. like a raw almond, perhaps.
Above: Phyllis in 1946 — age 18
the studies of buddhism and philosophy both garnered her interest in a late teenage me, but also a new (if strained) relationship to kindness. she just wasn’t born that way, but she tried over the last 15 years. i think that’s all we can ask of people— to try their best. i had dozens of extended talks with her at her table about what i was studying, what i was reading post-college, what i was writing and the philosophers that influenced it. she had a sort of stubborn humility, always saying something like “well i can’t understand any of that” and “nika, that’s way over my head. i’m just learning the basics.” in phyllis language, that translates to a huge compliment to me.
I wrote about giving her a Hannah Arendt book on her 95th birthday with some film photographs here. The next year, I picked it up off of her shelf and saw her notes inside. I scribble inside every book I own which my dad finds sacrilegious. Now we know where I got it from.
Above: Phyllis’s copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism I gifted her, 2024.
Above: Phyllis in her home office on her 96th birthday — my note on how to play music. Her note on some philosophy words i said that she’d like to look into. January 2024
she made it her project to do some genealogy for the family. my dad bought her a printer with a scanner that he had to “take in for service” about 45 times, which really just meant driving her to Best Buy and having them re-teach her how to use it. she ended up making a book on her computer and burning it onto a CD for all three of her children and all six of her grandchildren. it is my most prized possession and what i always say i would grab in a fire. there is a folder called “P’s former dates" which I love her for.
Above: Phyllis in 1947 — age 19, and a man who is not my grandfather at the “ZBT Dance”
i’d have to ask my dad for the timeline, but i know phyllis and bob met in seattle where they both went to college. bob got an electrical engineering degree and served in the navy during the war. he then went to both business and medical school at Stanford. they lived in san francisco and new orleans before settling in a bay area suburb where they raised their family. bob became a pediatrician. phyllis had three children and at one point much later went to law school? but didn’t become a lawyer? once again, born in the wrong time. but she took photos. and i thank all of the gods for that.
one of my favorite photographs of her is of when she got braces in the 1970s and is lifting weights in a weird cardigan vest.
Above: Phyllis in the 70s, somewhere, smiling.
this is one of my favorite photos my grandmother ever took of my grandfather. she called it “bob, studying.”
Above: 18th avenue apartment in San Francisco, 1951 — “Bob, studying”
another banger of bob below that i think is like… so punk rock… with my dad as an infant.
Above: Bob and my dad Dave, 1955
and either bob or a thoughtful woman picked up phyllis’ camera and turned it around a few times, thank goodness.
Above: Phyllis and my dad Dave, 1958
Above: Bob with his three children, my dad Dave and his sisters Kathy and Sue. Joshua Tree— early 1960s
Above: Dave and his sisters Kathy and Sue in the summer of 1972
Above: Grandpa Bob on Camano Island, Washington - 1972
it is a personal archive, a family scrapbook, and the most beautiful history. she has photos that date back to our ancestors in Romania and Ukraine in the late 1800s. I have very few friends who have archives like this, and i consider myself extraordinarily lucky. she also has a google doc called “life stories” which is incredibly brief and holds contradictory information to the way the photos are labeled. it makes me smile as a person who often takes things too seriously and romanticizes accuracy. i’m not totally sure who everyone is and where they were, but we take what we can get.
Above: Phyllis’ great grandparents, Moshe and Rachael Safine, and their daughter, Ida, Phyllis’ grandmother — late 1800s, Romania
Above: Ida Naishuller with Phyllis’ mom Ann as a baby— 1904 in Chernihiv, modern day Ukraine.
The document says that Ida had three children with Phillip, who died young. She then moved to the US and raised her family by sewing and tailoring fine clothes. Ann was 8 years old at the time.
Above: Phylis’ mother Ann’s wedding portrait, 1927
Phyllis turned 98 in January. she is in a hospice facility and mostly sleeps now. i went to visit her this weekend after a “you should visit” text from my father who famously never asks anything of me. on the first day, she recognized me a few times. on the second day, she slept the entire time we visited.
on the third day, i watched the hospice nurse feed her some sort of taupe colored mush. phyllis was always fussy about food. i think it was an elegant eating disorder, like so many women both then and now. she claims it was a combination of food sensitivities and her “deep knowledge” of nutrition. but she doesn’t fuss anymore. she eats when she can, which is very rarely. and eats what she can, which is now exclusively the aforementioned mush.
she doesn’t have a muscle left on her body. if you’ve ever seen someone in hospice you can probably picture what i’m saying. if you haven’t— subtract 30 pounds from the image in your head. it’s a new understanding for me of the phrase “a bag of bones.” the nurse was in her 70s and filipino and had some thing going on that covered her in hundreds of moles. she looked like the dark part of a fairy tale. all i could think about was whether or not she had been loved. and that i keep putting glp-1s in my cart and then deleting my cart. and that as i left for the airport a few days ago, i heard either a large mouse or a small rat in my pantry which my landlord doesn’t seem to want to address until three days from now.
during a moment of lucidity on day three, phyllis called me beautiful. i had just come out of the shower and hadn’t a stitch of makeup on and i believed her. aunt sue told her that she was a great mother and that made me cry because everyone in the room knew it wasn’t true but it was the only thing to say.
it really doesn’t matter what’s true. it matters what people remember.
while phyllis slept, we did a lot of crosswords. three in a row had a clue for “EPA” which i only learned from the simpson’s movie. one of the questions was the name of a challenger astronaut, which i knew was “judith resnik” because i recently auditioned to play her on television and am taking that as a good omen even though i most certainly would have heard by now. i hummed a song i couldn’t bring myself to sing aloud because i knew everyone would weep and we were more comfortable doing other things. can you hear it? she could. she smiled.
my father, aunt and i watched will ferrell do the SNL cold open and cackled at his portrayal as jeffrey epstein’s ghost. sue stared at phyllis’ skin and laughed as she told me that phyllis had a facelift at 60, long before i was born. she said the whole family got nose jobs except my dad who is going on 71 who chimed in with “it’s never too late.” the last thing phyllis said to me was “i think i’m done.”
just kidding. hospice isn’t that poetic.
she said that at one point and promptly fell back into her fleeting lorazepam haze, a word i only know because of parker posey. i said “wouldn’t it be amazing if she said that and just went?” we all nodded. she didn’t. in a later moment of eye contact i said “i love you” and she said “thank you” and i said “you’re the best” and she said “the best what?”
i vaped through my sweatshirt and texted an ex lover who told me all the stress literally melted off his body this weekend at the montecito hot springs. i lent him my camping gear and he thanked me and i told him it was my pleasure which i meant. i’m one of those people that hates to have bad blood. people tell me that comes down to a fear of death. i always say i don’t have that and nobody believes me. i wasn’t sure i believed myself, but i was able to confirm in real time as i faced phyllis. death is the only promise we know will be kept and as i briefly mentioned before, i am almost exclusively comforted by accuracy. it’s why the television shows i rewatch to fall asleep are not reality TV or charming comedies. it’s (psychotically) the newsroom and homeland. smart people chasing the truth with all they have makes me feel at ease.
i don’t like to have bad blood because i believe in diplomacy. i leap at any chance to be the bigger person, which is almost certainly an ego thing. but could it also just be that my dad raised me well? i have a montage in my head of times he has laughed at me being dramatic and saying something like “come on nika, get over it!” with loving kindness. the most loving kindness. he is a california swimmer boy at his core. i think being raised by an uptight phyllis in the 1970s locked him into a perma-ease that i will always be chasing and sometimes can find. he only pissy if you try to do things for him, which is a trait i inherited.
she made eye contact with him at one point and called him “dad” even though he’s her son. but “dave” sounds like “dad” and he looks like his grandfather, more so with each passing day.
Above LEFT: Dave’s grandparents, Phyllis’ dad Lou and Ann in Athens - 1960s.
Above RIGHT: My dad Dave and sister Lana in San Francisco — thanksgiving 2025
she may live a week. she may live 6 months. none of us know, and she’s not really there anymore. it’s a slow easy death, surrounded by loved ones and the most thoughtful nurses in a room with a door to the garden that she can no longer walk out to.
the last thing i actually heard her say was “oh i’m lucky.”
Above: Phyllis, me, and my sister Lana in the early 2000s
Above: Phyllis and I in the late 1990s.
Oh, Nika.
Can’t stop crying… this was perfection. I want more!
Xx