My grandmother was an aficionado of crosswords. Her sunroom released checkered wings of paper with every breath through the perpetually opened window, letters fluttering in their proper homes. Their leaves of black and white accompanied cascades of books, newspapers, lists, and unfinished letters. Her words stretched across the floor, damp underneath half-drunken iced coffee cups and half-melted lipsticks. She never discarded them—the answers to her knowledge swam, drifting in lifted letters.  

   They no longer fly. She too now sits, discarded, a sullen stone. She rather slouches like a swollen stump, her stomach protruding beneath her shrunken shirt. I remember when she was not this way—when she was alive. A light, a beam, a presence. Her words fluttered and swan-dived through the air, whisking her colorful and vibrant vocabulary into the ears of all whom surrounded her. Strangers, friends, lovers, family. Her words were her companions; she was fond of them all, shrieking with dazzling energy at the absurdity of an anecdote, crooning with hushed excitement at the painting my grandfather crafted. Her home was empty of emptiness. 

   It is a different kind of full now. It is a fullness of pregnant silence, sunken cheeks, thundering breaths. A dimness veils the eyes that once were aglow, luminous. The largest presence absent, however, is not her, but her voice. The physical being remains—if one were to see her, they would call her by name. A white label of identification strangles her swollen wrist, her birth name printed in smudged ink. But she can no longer be called Bestemor, grandmother, to me, for she is more of a stranger without her words.

   She no longer embraces the pen. Her tender fingers are clutching claws, grappling and grasping the hollow plastic of a hand mirror. She stares, lips half-pressed. Eyes of fog are affixed not on the present, but hazily quivering over its reflection. My grandmother breathes heavily, puffs of desolate air sinking into a sullen space. The synthetic cheer of the pink mirror saps competing hues, the white room shadowed in a blaring presence. Cheap light stumbles off sterile tiles in the windowless void. The floor, empty of newspaper. The clock chimes—her eyes quake. I wonder what she sees?  She is still able to find the mirror and yet no longer her voice. The once tangible tool is now the ungraspable truth. 

   Her presence used to be released in the pen; now it is the mirror. 
   The mirror is more passive—one must simply stare at it, look at the reflection in its oval, synthetic window, and feel. There are feelings that one may want to outwardly express, but that is for another day, when the fingers release the reflection and take the form of another reflective object. It is active, moving with a purpose. She is now unable to grasp the pen and voice to create, and the simplicity of the mirror panders to her moment—where she can remind herself of who she is. But this is because she has no choice. She has replaced the passivity of vanity in exchange for the past use of her reflection. 

   My grandmother and I will never truly see ourselves. I may look into the reflective surface, see a figure that resembles what I may identify as—young, woman, average. The mirroring woman may mimic my movements, lips curl as lips curl, limbs rise as limbs rise—but she is not me. For when I reach out to grasp the image, I hit stone. I cannot smash through the glass divider and reach for her hand. I cannot latch onto her shoulders and violently shake, shrieking, “This is not you.” I cannot. For she is a vision, a mere reflection of the light creeping through the cornea, passing the pupil, floating in between rods and cones, and drifting into the brain. She is a phantom birthed from light. To find identity in a mere fragment of the imagination is to create a pseudonym—I am more myself in my mind than in this mirror.

   The meaning of reflection clings to the mirror—it fuels the glass with a power, a tangible reference point to its onlooker. The figure is given a place in one’s reality— it is the perceived truth. However, when I stand in front of the distorted mirror, its fluorescent frame demanding attention in the corner of the funhouse, the physical reflection warps— how am I to say my eyes are not eternal creators of deception? Placing an emphasis on identity in a trick mirror lacks logic— and yet, I stand, engulfed in a clown figure. Limbs lengthened, stomachs swollen, eyes wide. The image of myself is no longer recognizable, and perhaps this is a reminder. To find identity in solely the image itself is deceiving, for reflection comes from more than the physical. 

   To reflect onto the world is to create— create words, create art, create motion. Passivity anchors the identity concentrated in the mirror—it is lifeless, still, barren —drowned. My grandmother is more than a shell of a figure— her identity is enwrapped in her creations, her simple presence, her past living. Her search for recognition of self may gaze at a sunken face, but I wonder if in her reflection she greets the eyes of a younger self, the one who graced trembling bodies with her soothing presence as she nursed them back to health, the one who embraced connection with every inch of her being. Her gray fur for hair no longer matted, but neatly swept up in a knot. Wrinkles no longer ironed into the crevices of cheeks, but erased by the ironing of a white, crisp uniform. In the mind, her body may glide amongst the lonely, the isolated, the sick, gifting each with a smile of grace and reassurance— they will be themselves once again. The reflection itself may not be where her identity is found, but in the interactions with the world that it reminds her of— the squeezing of a hand, the soothing of a wound, the compassion of a heart.

   But I may never know my grandmother’s identity and where she finds it. For if I could, I would be able to understand my own, to pinpoint the fragments of our broken and jagged lives that form a person. The mind observes the mind, and perhaps in that there is the confusion— the desire for the concrete becomes intangible. There is discomfort in labeling an identity in something ungraspable, and to have the mirror to cling onto is better than nothing. Yet, when I cling onto the materialistic reminder, clutching its handle, false hopes are placed into the arbitrary and coarse—I am left with angered palms. When people see my grandmother, they may create an identity for her—lazy, overweight, diminishing, broken. When people stare at me, I do not want the same treatment, an analysis of the easily accessible physical self to dictate my whole being. The fear of not being truly seen is one that propels within me a desire to speak and to create.

   But sometimes I can’t. Because it is that same judgment that shakes the voice. I can control what I say, and for that I may be identified, a supplement to the evident image. This is both a blessing and a curse—for my choices add to other’s depictions of my identity, my value. For my grandmother, she no longer has that choice, but I do. And when I remain silent, a voice amputated from its body, I leave my identity to be dismembered by those around me.
   Why do we care so much?

   It is our own identity—it does not impact the stranger, the peer, even the close companion. It is a personal truth, and I don’t know where it stems from, but it feels to arrive through the streams of introspection - on my passions, regrets, desires, attractions, distastes, flaws. I drift in a flood of thoughts that may never cross the barrier of my lips, and yet, they thrash, thundering waves. When the mind is still able to comprehend, it is in motion—it may identify itself.

   I stare at my grandmother, and in the mirror, she may look lifeless, with a passive gaze on the reflection projected upon her—but perhaps it is more introspective than that. Perhaps she is using this physical reminder to creep inward, to find her identity in her thoughts, a focus, a center. Her mind is still active; I can see it in the sudden mutter of her lips, the occasional gleam in the eye. Her brow threads in frustration as she attempts to form words, and in this, I see her.  

   Perhaps our identity is supplemented through the eyes, in what we have seen, in who has seen us. But it is not simply in the physical sense, for it takes only but a moment to register my grandmother’s feathered, unruly hair, tender cheeks, and loose arms. For the eyes heighten our true intrinsic qualities—they display our eyes of empathy, our eyes of anger, our eyes of compassion. It is in the workings of the lips, the movement of the arms, and the echoing of the ears where the identity finds itself, for the presence of the actual face is in constant deterioration. As a child, my face, anew. As an emerging adult, my face is still fresh, but with the cracks of wrinkles, the peppering of bumps and bruises. And yet, it is still where we look to find ourselves. The emphasis placed on this genetic concoction is one that identifies our abilities and successes. The gene-filled topography of the face is catalogued in a predetermined mapping, but what about the crevices in which I am rooted in choice? In my valleys of empathy, my mountains of passion, my tributaries of triumph and my pits of struggle? My emotions, my adorations, my relationships, these are perhaps more concrete than her, the girl in the mirror.

   There are some, however, where the reflection is no more tangible than the ambiguity of identity. Mirror-image agnosia— a rare condition where the subject possesses typical, normative conditions, except for an inability to identify themselves in a mirror. They can identify the mirror itself, identify other objects, identify other faces, but to their own image, there is no familiarity, no recognition of self. Five subjects possessing this condition were analyzed by Sadanandavalli Retnaswami Chandra and Thomas Gregor Issac, and were shown a mirror in a brightly lit room. The space was devoid of decoration, white, barren. The subjects would approach their own image in the wall mirror as an entirely independent being—some a friend, some a stranger, some a thief, some a deity. They would speak with fervor at these reflections of themselves, awaiting a response. One of the women approached the mirror slowly, cocking her head to the side as she began to speak to herself, asking for the reflection’s name. When her reflection did not respond, her voice wavered, questioning why the woman in front of her would not speak. She spoke quickly, words spiraling and ricocheting off of the glass reflection, awaiting to be captured by the woman mirroring her. The mirror remained mute. 

   The subject was asked by the researchers who this woman was—she stated, “Here is a woman who does not know her name.”

   And perhaps there is some truth to this—her reflection will never know her name, for she does not exist as an entity. But the real woman, the one with the lesion to the right parietal lobe of her brain, does in fact know her name, know of her being. Despite the disconnect to the mirror image, the subject still possesses an identity. It does not fall upon her reflection—in fact, it cannot in her case. However, she still has a name, a figure, a purpose. We have the ability to reflect upon ourselves in a way that she is not able to—we may identify our emotion in the mirror. But it is by second glance, when we are not in motion and not celebrating relationships, art, life. 

   From my grandmother’s heredity comes an innate celebration in the beautiful, and so I have inherited an adoration for sunflowers from her. She would plant them upon the mantle, adorning her home with their smiling, uplifted faces. Their brilliant petals of gold and rich seeds seemed to be extensions of the light filtering through the sunroom. They gently blew along the murmuring discards of pages, but swayed with poise, affixed in their mismatched vases. The buds seemed to stretch as though they may live forever.

   But they didn’t. And that was a fatal flaw of my grandmother. She never threw them away. They rather retained their space in the sunroom, propped up alongside discarded newspapers filled with her arching, drawled handwriting. The petals would fall into shrunken pieces of sunlight, sapped of their golden hour. The beauty I once saw as eternal had a withering due date.

   And just as the flowers, we, the living creatures, have images that diminish. And yet, we may still identify them as flora, growing, flexible creatures that interact with the conversion of oxygen and the capture of light. We are still ourselves, regardless and independent of the reflected image in the mirror. Our identity eventually falls with the seeds of a sinking flower, reflecting upon the still waters of growth in their deterioration. Our creation is what contributes to our eternal identity—my grandmother is herself in her words, her presence, her warmth, her glances. The shrunken petals that are now her limbs are not beautiful- but her seed of a heart, filled with newspapers and sunflowers and laughter, still grows.