The Postmenopausal Fairy Tale

Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. 

“I’m dying,” says my grandmother.

“Dying where?” I ask. “I’m coming. Don’t go anywhere before I get there.”

“I have to go,” says my grandmother.

On December 26, 2018, my grandmother, Gertrude Mark, died somewhere.

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If this were a fairy tale, I’d go look for her.

My hair has been going slowly white since I turned eighteen. I color it brown, but a few months ago I decided to grow out one strand. Like snow. Like the cold, bright path I would take to look for my grandmother if this were a fairy tale. But it’s not. This is America, and my grandmother is dead.

When my mother sees the strand she begins to cry. “I hate it,” she says. “I just hate it.”

In Italo Calvino’s retelling of the 1883 Italian fairy tale “The False Grandmother,” “a mother had to sift flour, and told her little girl to go to her grandmother’s to borrow the sifter.” In other versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the mother sends her daughter to grandmother’s with a loaf of hot bread and a bottle of milk. Or cake and a bottle of wine, because grandmother is ill. Whatever the version, there are always woods between mother and grandmother, and the woods are thick with wolves. There is undergrowth, a rising moon, and the unsolvable riddle of choosing a path of pins over