By Amanda Knox
 
“You should grab…that thing…that you know for sure…and put an exclamation mark…around it…and that’s the end…of that. Put the secret…around it…and whatever was…a secret…make it…for sure.”
 
This was the response my grandmother, Sylvia, murmured to me from her hospital bed when I asked her for a piece of winning advice. If it sounds cryptic, it’s because she was recovering from chemotherapy and a stroke. Each word came slowly, painstakingly, and there were drawn-out pauses that made me worry she had lost her train of thought.
 
This was very unlike the Sylvia I knew. The Sylvia I knew was gregarious, chatty, people-oriented, especially if those people were family. She knew the names of all the beauticians at the nail salon in the local strip mall. Her neighbors were intimate friends. To me, she was like all that’s good about a Hallmark card—sweet, sentimental, sincere, reliable, communicative, though lacking subtlety. Because she lives a seven-and-a-half-hour drive away in Montana, I even associate her with the holidays.
 
Last weekend, my sisters and I made that seven-and-a-half-hour drive to visit her in the hospital, after her health suddenly and unexpectedly took a turn for the worse. We had been cautioned to expect changes, especially resulting from the chemotherapy, but even so, it was shocking to take in the loss of not just her hair and weight, but her energy, and seemingly, her spirit. At first sight, it was like Sylvia had collapsed inward like an old mineshaft.
 
My sisters and I floundered for a bit. What could we say, when it was like Sylvia could barely hear us? What could we do, when it seemed like it took all of Sylvia’s energy just to exist? With Sylvia in such a state, and barely recognizable, how could we relate to her enough to interact with her?
 
We knew Sylvia was in there, and we imagined we just needed to give her a hand to draw her back out. I asked her if she wanted to write a column with me, imagining she might want to take up a genuine offer to be heard, about anything. I was even willing to hear her opinion about voting for Trump. Sylvia seemed interested, so I asked her what we should write about.
 
“Winning,” she said.
 
“OK. What about winning?”
 
“You keep on…”
 
“You keep on keeping on?” This was a Sylvia-ism. My sisters and I exchanged encouraged looks.
 
“One step at a time.”
 
I pressed on, trying to encourage Sylvia to examine the subject of winning from many different angles. How do you win? How do you know you’ve won? Do you have any winning advice? Her answers were either short and repetitive, or wandering and cryptic. She struggled with complex or distant concepts, like the past, or her own spirituality. It became apparent that Sylvia was firmly locked in her present moment, and her mind was almost entirely occupied with a necessary mantra: “Keep on keeping on. One step at a time.”
 
It reminded me of climbing a steep hill on my bike. To get through the pain and maintain the necessary momentum, I automatically fall into a hyper-focused rhythm. My mind thinks, “I think I can, I think I can,” and with each “think” and “can,” my feet push down on the pedals. “I think I can” and nothing else, all the way up to the top.
 
Sylvia wasn’t just existing. She was in the midst of a lonely, painful journey through her body and through time. And whether or not her body would follow, her mind was bent on making it. Hers was a whole other plane of existence, without distraction, without doubt. A survivor, surviving.
 
She did have room for one more coherent thought, though. I asked her, in her whole life, what was her greatest victory?
 
“Now,” she said. “You all are here now.”
 
As far away as Sylvia was, it turned out that what she really valued outside of her focus was us. Entrenched though we were in our distracted, complicated world, Sylvia needed our connection, because her love for us was such a big part of who she is. We were her world outside of the collapsed mineshaft, and she needed to know that we were there to witness her win herself back, “one step at a time.” The victory was in sharing it.