I arrive at Grandma’s apartment the week after Easter. Her door is flanked by two little shelves, just like all the doors stretching down the hall of her independent living complex. On one shelf sits a glass bowl filled with plastic eggs. On the other shelf, a planter with four pink wooden tulips.

I am here to help for the weekend. Grandma informs me of my first and most urgent task — swapping out the Easter decorations on those shelves for what she calls “general spring” decorations. This is important and must be done right away. It is not something with which her home health aides can assist. They are good for counting pills and washing breakfast dishes and taking her to medical appointments. They do not handle home decor. At least not to her liking.

She is dependent on her aides, but regularly disappointed by them. The afternoon aide insists on putting her to bed at 6:45pm, so that when it’s time to clock out at seven, Grandma is safely tucked in for the night. But after the aide leaves, Grandma gets up and goes about her evening. I tell her she can speak up about it, but she doesn’t want to cause trouble. This bedtime charade has been going on for a year. Maybe more.

She and I head down the hall to the storage unit. It is a long walk for a 93-year-old and her rollator. Her apartment sits at the farthest end of the building. She gets no through traffic, yet she insists on maintaining a welcoming doorway. It is a social contract between the residents, to keep things cheerful and up-to-date. And it is a contract with herself. The same way she puts on a full face of makeup every morning. She can’t see the mirror very well, but her fingers remember what to do.

At the storage unit, Grandma’s wire cage is nestled beside other wire cages, stuffed with the artificial Christmas trees and empty suitcases of her neighbors. She perches on the seat of her rollator and instructs me to find a certain sprig of artificial flowers. It’s older than me, her forty-year-old granddaughter, and the plastic may crumble at any moment. But she evalutes it carefully, as though it is freshly picked.

She chooses a porcelain vase to hold the sprig. And a hanging plaque with sunflowers on it. Although sunflowers are more of a summer flower than a spring flower, we agree they will have to do. Most of her things have already been given away. There is not much left in the way of general spring decor.

I lock up the wire cage. We shuffle back to the apartment, passing by the other doors, admiring them — and occasionally judging. I arrange her little shelves to her exacting specifications. She decides to leave up the planter with the four pink wooden tulips. I remember it from the sunroom in her old house.

That house is long gone, of course, along with the other roots of her former life. The international travel, the Florida condo, the cabin in the Adirondacks. And her loving husband, although she tells me she still talks to him.

Her world is small and shrinking every day. The cat across the hall recently died. And then, the cat’s owner, Lydia, left to go live with her family. Without Lydia, Grandma has nobody to help her down the stairs during midnight fire drills. She struggles one step at a time to get outside. The management requires her to be able to do this on her own, to demonstrate the independent part of independent living. But who among us can claim independence? We are companion plants. It is the only way we grow.

When the home aides are off duty, Grandma’s five adult daughters alternate long visits. They debate amongst themselves over email. Is it time to move her elsewhere? Or is the move itself a stress she can’t handle? There is no good answer. There is only the inevitable wilting of the human body, its constant need for care — care which blooms in various shades of “not enough.”

In the meantime, Grandma tends the garden of her doorway, honoring life’s only certainty: the passage of seasons. She cries out to all who pass by, “I am here. I am still part of this beautiful world.”