44/88

44/88 is a personal project about memory, aging, and intergenerational connection. When I was born, my grandmother was 44 — the same age I am now. Through our shared age, the project explores how we remember our loved ones only through their roles.

44/88

My grandmother is 88. I am 44.

When I was born, she was the same age I am now.

But in my memory, she was never a young woman. She was simply my grandmother from the very beginning.I remember my mother as young and beautiful. I watched her change, grow up, and gradually grow older.There was no such transition with my grandmother. I never knew the woman she was at forty-four. I never knew the girl she had once been.

I remember the scent of her perfume. I remember her tight hugs that I didn’t like. I remember the obligatory kisses goodbye that I always wanted to avoid. Back then, it seemed to me that old age was her only story.

Recently, she took out a dress.

“I wore this when I was the same age you are now.”I tried it on.It fit me perfectly.And in that moment, for the first time, I saw before me not only the person I had called my grandmother all my life.I saw a woman.A woman my age.

And suddenly I understood: when I was born, she was living the very same kind of life I am living now. She had her own habits, her favorite dresses, her work, her exhaustion, her joys, her plans. It’s just that this woman had never existed in my memory.Now I have reached the age when I could become a grandmother myself.No one asks us whether we are ready for it. Just as no one asks whether we are ready to grow up, to grow old, or one day to see our parents’ features in the mirror.

It simply happens.

Sometimes I think about my future grandchildren.

How will they remember me?

Will they see me as the forty-four-year-old woman I am?

Or will I, too, instantly become a grandmother to them — without a past, without a youth, without the life I lived before they came along?But there is another thought.To her, I will always be her granddaughter.It doesn’t matter how old I am — five, fifteen, or forty-four. As long as she is alive, I remain a granddaughter in her world.

And one day, that will disappear.

Not because I will stop being her granddaughter, but because the person for whom that role exists will no longer be here.Perhaps growing up is not only about watching the people we love grow older.It is also about one day realizing that the person you have called your grandmother all your life was a woman.And meeting her only when you yourself reach her age.