My Highlight Time is a HiMoment column where real readers share the small, often unspoken moments of self-care, connection, and discovery that shaped them. Names have been changed to protect privacy.
What My Grandmother Taught Me About Desire and Aging
By Elena, 30 — Miami, FL
Nobody in my family ever talked about desire and aging — not my mother, not my aunts, certainly not the women at church. So when my eighty-three-year-old grandmother brought it up on an ordinary Thursday afternoon, sitting at her kitchen table in a housecoat and slippers, I almost choked on my cafecito. She said it plainly, the way she says everything: “Elena, I still feel things. People think that stops. It doesn’t.” I set my cup down. The air conditioning hummed. And for the next two hours, my grandmother told me things about her body, her longing, and her private life that I had never heard any woman in my family say out loud.
I’m a journalist. I interview strangers about the most intimate parts of their lives for a living. I’ve written about grief, addiction, migration, love. But that afternoon, sitting across from a woman I thought I knew completely, I realized I had never once considered that she might still want. That she might still ache. That desire doesn’t expire the way I’d been quietly taught it does.
The Conversation Nobody Prepares You For
It started because I was complaining. I’d been single for about a year after a relationship that drained me, and I was telling Abuela that I didn’t miss the man so much as I missed the feeling of being wanted. She was peeling a mango with a paring knife, the way she always does — one long curl of skin — and she looked up at me and said, “You don’t need a man for that.”
I laughed. She didn’t.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Your grandfather has been gone eleven years. You think I stopped feeling things the day he died?”
I didn’t know what to say. I had honestly never thought about it. My grandmother is the woman who makes arroz con pollo for every birthday, who goes to Mass on Sundays, who watches her telenovelas at seven and is asleep by nine. She is soft and familiar and smells like Maja soap. She is not, in the version of her I carried in my head, a woman with desire.
But she kept talking. She told me that after my grandfather died, she went through a long stretch of numbness — months where her body felt like it belonged to someone else, like it was just a thing she moved through rooms. She said the grief was in her skin, not just her heart. She couldn’t stand to be touched. Even a hug from my mother felt like too much.
“And then one day,” she said, “I was in the bath, and I felt something. Like waking up. Like my body remembered it was still here.”
She paused. Set down the knife. Looked at me with an expression I can only describe as defiant tenderness.
“I was seventy-two years old, Elena. And I thought: why am I ashamed of this?”
What Nobody Tells You About Desire as You Get Older
My grandmother grew up in Havana in the 1940s. She married at nineteen. She had four children by twenty-eight. She told me that nobody — not her mother, not her doctor, not a single friend — ever talked to her about pleasure as something that belonged to her. It was always framed as something she gave, something she provided. When she was young, desire was dangerous. When she was middle-aged, it was irrelevant. And when she was old, it was supposed to be gone.
“But it wasn’t gone,” she said. “It just changed shape.”
She described it carefully, the way you describe a landscape you’ve studied for a long time. She said desire at eighty-three is not the same frantic thing it was at twenty-five. It’s slower. Quieter. More specific. She said she notices warmth differently now — the sun on her forearms, the heat of a cup in her hands, the weight of a blanket at night. She said her body speaks to her in a language she didn’t learn until she was alone.
I asked her if she was lonely. She said, “Sometimes. But lonely and dead are not the same thing. I am very much alive.”
She told me something that has stayed with me every day since: “The women in this family were taught to disappear into the people they love. I disappeared into your grandfather. Your mother disappeared into her children. Don’t do that, Elena. Even when you love someone. Especially then.”
She said that after my grandfather died, she had to learn — at seventy-one — how to exist as a body that was not in service to another body. She had to learn that comfort could come from her own hands. She said it simply, without embarrassment. She told me she bought a small device — something gentle, something quiet — and kept it in the drawer of her nightstand beside her rosary and her reading glasses. She said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. Because to her, it was.
“Ten minutes before I fall asleep,” she said. “That is my time. Nobody else’s.”
I thought of Derek — a man I’d interviewed months earlier for a piece about caregivers. He had moved home to care for his mother with dementia, and he told me something almost identical. He said the hardest part wasn’t the work. It was forgetting he had a body that could feel something other than exhaustion. He described those ten minutes at night as the only part of the day that was entirely his. I hadn’t understood him fully then. Sitting across from my grandmother, I did.
Learning to Talk About What We Never Discuss
I asked Abuela why she was telling me all of this now. She shrugged — that particular Cuban shrug that means both “why not” and “because it matters.”
“Because you said you miss feeling wanted,” she said. “And I want you to know that you can want yourself. That is not a lesser thing. That is the first thing.”
I started crying. Not dramatically — just a slow leak of tears that I couldn’t stop. Because she was right. I had spent a year mourning a man’s attention when what I had actually lost was my own. I had stopped touching my own skin with care. I showered fast. I dressed without looking. I ate standing up. I had made my body into a commute — something I moved through to get somewhere else.
My grandmother reached across the table and held my wrist. Her hand was cool and dry, the skin thin as paper over bones that had carried four children and buried a husband and outlived two sisters. She said, “Start small. A bath. A lotion you like the smell of. Your own hands on your own skin and nowhere to be.”
That night, I went home and took the longest bath I’d had in years. I used the good oil, the one I’d been saving for some occasion that never came. I turned off my phone. I lay in the water until it cooled and then I let it drain and just stayed there for a while, feeling the air on my wet skin, feeling the fact that I was a body. Not a deadline. Not a byline. Not someone’s ex-girlfriend. A body that was warm and tired and alive.
It wasn’t dramatic. Nothing shifted with a thunderclap. But something opened — a small door I didn’t know was closed. I started paying attention to what felt good in the most ordinary, daily sense. The texture of clean sheets. Cold water after a run. The weight of my own hand on my chest when I was falling asleep.
How Intergenerational Wisdom Changed My Relationship With Myself
It’s been five months since that conversation. I visit my grandmother every Thursday. We still drink cafecito. We still talk about her telenovelas. But something between us is different now — a new honesty, a new frequency. She asks me how I’m treating myself, and she doesn’t mean whether I’m eating enough vegetables. She means: are you paying attention to your own aliveness? Are you letting yourself feel things? Are you taking those ten minutes?
I am. Not every night, but most. I’ve learned that self-care isn’t always a face mask or a journal entry. Sometimes it’s acknowledging that my body has needs that aren’t about performance or presentation or anyone else’s timeline. Sometimes it’s just stillness and sensation and the radical act of not being ashamed.
My grandmother is eighty-three. She has arthritis in both knees and cataracts that are getting worse. She forgets the word for things sometimes and gets frustrated. She is aging, visibly and undeniably, the way all of us will age. But she is not diminished. She is not gone. She told me that desire is not something the body loses — it’s something the world teaches you to hide. And the hiding is what kills it.
I think about all the women in my family who never had this conversation. My mother, who I love, but who would be mortified by what Abuela told me. My aunts, who would change the subject. All the women who went quiet when their bodies got older or their partners left or their children grew up and moved away. All that silence, passed down like a recipe nobody writes.
My grandmother broke the silence. Not with a speech or a revelation, but with a mango and a paring knife and the simple sentence: I still feel things.
I want to be the kind of woman who can say that at eighty-three. I want to be the kind of woman who can say it at thirty. I’m learning. Slowly, clumsily, with too much cafecito and a grandmother who refuses to disappear.
Last Thursday, as I was leaving, she called after me from the door. “Elena. Don’t wait until you’re seventy-two to stop being ashamed.”
I’m not going to.
Have your own Hi-Moment to share? We’d love to hear it. Send your story to [email protected], or tag us on Instagram with #MyHighlightTime. You may also enjoy: At 32, I Finally Learned How to Date Myself and How to Actually Relax When You’re Alone. All submissions are anonymized and edited with care.
