Whether I always understood it or not, my grandmother Nicole is one of the reasons I am so determined to live an expansive life.
It is not always easy to write about her.
She was a beautiful woman who spent much of her adult life living with serious mental-health symptoms that the people around her did not have the language, resources or support to understand well. I cannot tell you, with certainty, what diagnosis would explain what she experienced. I can tell you that her suffering was often interpreted through fear, stigma and spiritual explanations rather than met with the sustained care she deserved.
Her world became painfully small.
I learned that she had died while sitting in my favorite spaghetti spot in Ghana.
I remember feeling grief and relief at the same time. Grief because she was gone. Relief because a life marked by illness, mistreatment and isolation had finally stopped hurting her.
That combination of feelings was complicated then. It still is.
But when I think about my grandmother now, I often think about places.
I have a favorite spaghetti spot in Ghana.
I have a favorite pizza spot in Guatemala.
I have a favorite jollof spot in New York.
I have a favorite udon spot in Montreal.
Those places matter to me for reasons that have very little to do with food. They are evidence of movement. Choice. Curiosity. A life that has had room to stretch beyond one neighborhood, one expectation, one version of who I am allowed to be.
“The freedom to live expansively is something I refuse to take for granted.”
I know what it is to struggle with my own mental health. In my late teens and early twenties, depression and anxiety consumed parts of my life that I still grieve. There were years when my world felt much smaller than I wanted it to be, when simply making it through the day took more out of me than I knew how to explain. Sometimes I think about the experiences I missed, the opportunities I let pass, and the version of myself I might have known sooner if I had not spent so much time simply trying to stay afloat.
That is part of why my grandmother’s story stays with me so deeply. Her story and mine are not the same. I do not need them to be. I would never pretend that the struggles I have experienced compare to a lifetime of illness, abuse, isolation, and inadequate care.
But I understand, in my own way, what it feels like when your own mind begins placing limits around your life.
The difference is that I have things my grandmother never had: language for what I am experiencing, access to mental health care, the ability to ask for help, the freedom to leave, the freedom to return, and enough autonomy to build a life around more than survival. I have choices available to me that she simply did not.
I do not think I owe my grandmother a perfect life because hers was painful. That would turn love into another burden. And I certainly have not lived a perfect one.
But I do want to honor her by using the freedom I have.
To go places.
To come home.
To ask for help when I need it.
To build a life with joy in it on purpose.
And every so often, to sit in some little restaurant far from where I started and remember that being there is not ordinary to me.
It is part of the inheritance I choose to make from her life.