Nicolas had to fly back to France again last week for his grandmother’s 100th birthday.

I had a chance to visit Mamet when I was in France last month.

She terrifies me. It doesn’t help that I’ve heard all these stories about her being a great disciplinarian when Nicolas was growing up. But, one time, I gave her a gift of bath soaps made from virgin coconut oil and, although she said it in French, I understood exactly what she said: “Is this supposed to make me look younger?”

Since then, I’ve been grateful for the fact that I don’t speak French and she doesn’t speak English and we therefore never have to address each other directly. When she’s around, I smile and nod my head a lot. She probably thinks I’m a vacuous twit. And she wouldn’t be entirely wrong…

Although, one time, when I was having a conversation with Nicolas’ mom, Mamet surprised all of us by correcting Guylaine’s English. She smiled sheepishly when confronted and confessed that, when she’s not put on the spot, she can remember some of her English.

She’s a feisty one, that one. She only moved to a home recently. At most, she’s been there – two, three years? Before that, she was maintaining an apartment on her own somewhere near Versailles. She was still traveling with Nicolas’ mom well into her nineties. She only moved to a home because she kept falling and hurting herself.

It would turn out that Mamet is nearly blind. She expressed annoyance at her doctors. She wants to know what’s wrong with her eyes and all they can tell her is that she’s old. “I know that,” she says, “but what’s wrong with my eyes?” She needs a magnifying glass to read. When we were there, she said that we were all wonderfully blurry so that she could imagine us as she liked.

She’s also lost most of her hair and she’s shrunk.

Otherwise, she’s fine. She still refuses any help, and crossed from her bed to a chair on her own. She asked Nicolas about the fish he caught in the river by her ancestral house. She said, “My eyesight may be going but my hearing is fine, and I hear and know about everything that’s going on.”

Nicolas fishing at the Creuse River in France.

She gossiped about the other patients at the home. She said some of them drool or stare into space. She’s glad to have the mental faculty to still make fun of them.

Sometimes, the doctors give her a hard time for not eating enough. “I tell them, ‘If I ate the way you want me to eat, do you think I’d live to be 100?’” She used her magnifying glass and read the menu for the day. “It sounds good, but it’s terrible. I only eat what I need to sustain myself.”

We had some chocolate and, when I passed my water bottle to Nicolas, she commented, “Ah, yes. That seems to be the fashion with young people nowadays.” She claims to drink only one glass of water a day.

We visited for almost three hours and, during that time, she did most of the talking. She has a young physiotherapist whom she likes to talk to. He asked her if she could do it all over again, which year would she relive. She answered that she was happiest when she turned 50 because that was when Nicolas was born. She’s made no secret about it. He is her favorite grandchild.

When he was in France, Nicolas sent me a message: “Mamet loves her pillow. (We gave her a Tempur pillow for her birthday.) She said it’s the best sleep she’s ever had and joked that she is starting a new century sponsored by NASA. She says thank you.”

Even with oceans between Mamet and me, I can’t tell you how relieved and happy I was to hear that.

Happy 100th birthday, Madame Perrin!