Cinnamon raisin with cream cheese

I was nervous as we were driving up there. I kept looking at the directions over and over again, even though I had them memorized the moment we pulled out of the driveway. We left the kids at my mom's because I wasn't really sure what to expect. I felt conflicted leaving them, knowing what a source of happiness they are for my grandmother. I promised her I would bring them soon to visit.

My heart was in my stomach as I walked up to the front door of the building. Josh had come with me, which I was grateful for. I did not want to do this alone. I am not sure what I expected, but I do recall my first thought was that it did not smell bad, much to my relief. I found my grandmother quickly, and after having a bite to eat that I'd brought for her (a cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, always her favorite), we headed outside to sit in the sun for a little bit. It was calm. Josh went for a walk to give us a little privacy and we talked, about playing cards and making pies and my kids. I asked her if she knew when she was forgetting stuff. She said sometimes. She said there were times when she could almost remember stuff and other times it was just completely gone. Several time I felt like I might cry, but I was afraid if I started I might n to be able to stop, so I just kept talking.

I had been wondering for awhile what level of recognition she had about her condition. She thinks she forgets stuff sometimes but its not too bad. She thinks she can live on her own still. Rather than contradict her, I told her that we feel this is the safest place for her to live right now and maybe we reevaluate in a couple weeks if there is a better place for her. Today my mother will visit her. She probably will not remember that I was there. That doesn't bother me anymore. A friend sent me an article on Alzheimer's which was truly fascinating. One of the many things I learned from it was that it doesn't matter if the Alzheimer's patient remembers a specific conversation or visit, if it was a positive experience they still benefit from it.

So I will keep trying to connect with her every time I see her, because even if she forgets me as soon as I leave, the love and kindness I show her will remain, long after her memory is gone.

More than just the sadness

This blog began as a place for me to come and vent and cry and yell at how unfair this whole situation is. And while I still feel the sadness and anger that led me here to begin with, I am beginning to want to write about more. I want to share about raising kids and running restaurants and husbands and ex-husbands and my fear of death and my abundance of wonderful gay best friends.

I am an ordinary girl who moved to the city at eighteen and have been blessed to meet extraordinary people along the way. I never had a plan. Like ever. Everything, year after year, has just kind of happened. I had jobs that I liked and ones that I hated. I lived in mostly small, crappy apartments with bad heat and lead paint and views of nothing good but I though they were amazing. It wasn't until very recently that I started dressing appropriately for the weather. Each year it was like a shock that I would need gloves and a hat to keep me warm.

Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the reality of how many people depend on me. My kids, my employees, my family. I get that I can't breathe I want to eat something or buy something or run screaming from the house feeling. But then it passes. And I remind myself how blessed I am, to have the family I have, my husband, my kids, my mother. Life is good. Not always, but enough to make the bad times worth it.

Figuring it out

I've never had to put a loved one in a nursing home before. Or witnessed someone decline physically and mentally, while having moments of perfect clarity. This is all new to me and I am figuring it out as I go.

This has been an exhausting, heart breaking experience. I think about my grandmother numerous times through out the day. When I'm getting my kids ready for school, during my first cup of coffee, playing with Crosby in the park, having lunch with friends. I am often just wondering what she is doing in that exact moment. Is she sad or lonely? Does she feel okay? Is she upset that she is not home?

I will see her on Sunday in the nursing home. I'm not really sure what to expect when I get there. My expectations are very low, mostly just hoping to find her calm and safe and possibly even content. I guess my expectations aren't that low. I'm an optimist a heart, I can't change that. I want her to be happy. It's all I've ever really wanted for her.

Card sharks

He asked her if she was a good card player. She said she believes she is. He said next time he is going to bring a deck of cards.

My mom and her partner Shabazz went to visit my grandma tonight, for the final time in the rehab center. Tomorrow she will be moved to a nursing home, a place I swore I would never put her in. I feel so much that I have failed her.

She will never return to her apartment. Not that she really liked it very much, which she made clear to me on many occasions, but still, it was hers. It allowed her to retain some independence.  Even after we had her sell her car, she still had her own place.

I close my eyes for a few moments to remember the way she once was, the woman who bathed me and fed me and scolded me and loved me. The woman who taught me to play cards. We would spend hour after hour sitting at the kitchen table play gin rummy. Bowls of snacks and cold drinks and lots of conversation. She always shuffled the deck, because she was so very good at it and I was not. I'm still not. She'd present the deck for me to cut and I would knock on top, indicating to her I trusted her and didn't need to cut the deck. At least that's what it always meant to me.

It's amazing to me that these times will not happen again. Its all in the past.

Don't Go In

I keep telling myself this over and over.

Don't go in. Just wait. It will be over soon.

Sleep training. It is for sure one of the most difficult things I've had to do in my entire life and certainly my very least favorite thing about being a parent. Listening to my child crying, shouting my name, so upset, and knowing I could end it all if I'd just go in.  But I can't. It's this terrible cycle I'm in with him, that I am his only form of comfort. And I know that my job as a parent is not to fulfill his every need, but to teach him how to fulfill his own needs.

Not My Cup of Tea

Feeling like I'm operating on borrowed time this morning, stolen moments that could vanish in an instant. The baby was up more than he slept last night, which now seems likes a mixed blessing, as he is peacefully slumbering in my bed, I have accomplished every task I wanted to this morning and now have a rare oppurtunity to write while the sun is still out.

Going to visit my grandma today and wondering who will be there when I arrive, which grandma will I be visiting.  Will she be flat and quiet and tired and confused? Or will she be pleased to see me and the kids? It seems no matter which one it is, she is always insistent that everyone in my family needs a good hair brushing.  Nearly every time she sees me she asks what I've done with my hair, in a tone that indicates she is not really pleased with it.  Rather than try to explain ombré to an 84 year old woman I usually say 'Why gram, don't you like it?' to which she responds, 'Its not my cup of tea.'  And this is okay with me. Even her insistence that my children look like ragamuffins is totally fine by me. I want her to have an opinion, to stay engaged.  I don't need her to approve of me or all of my decisions in life.  Especially if those decisions involving forgoing hairbrushing in exchange for peace and quiet once in awhile.

I'm going to the wake tonight of a woman that my grandmother really loved.  A woman that was my neighbor when I was growing up, a woman that was there, in my house, in the middle of a blizzard on the night that I was born, standing next to my grandmother as I entered this world.  Karla was one of those people you encounter rarely in life. She was a powerhouse. My mother and I talked a lot about her last weekend.  She could do anything, my mom said, there wasn't anything she wasn't good at.  Her daughter Tracy wrote beautifully about her mother's journey through cancer in such and honest and raw way that it was an honor to read it.  It has been my inspiration to start writing here. I am looking forward to seeing Tracy and her sister Terry tonight, I just wish the circumstances were different.

214 Elm

I can't say with any certainty when it began.  Certainly for as long as I can remember.

Spaghetti and meatballs. Apple Pie. Elegant Spinach (her name for creamed spinach).

She was always generous to send you home with leftovers. It was what the leftovers were packed up in that were another story. Sometime around the early 90's my grandmother started labeling EVERY piece of Tupperware she owned with a permanent marker.  214 ELM was scrawled on the bottoms of containers and the tops of lids.  Corningware lids, wonton soup containers, nothing was safe from that pen.

As I write this, I feel sad. The days of packing up leftovers is passed.  She no longer cooks, for herself or anyone else. She no longer has a kitchen. She has not lived in her apartment for a month and I do not expect her to return.  I pushed her to move into this apartment last year because I felt it was what was best for her. I felt she would be safer and less lonely.  I was wrong about the second part.  Her Alzheimer's was far more advanced than I realized.  With her I could never tell if she was unwilling or unable to change, to make friends, to join in.  Either way, it doesn't matter because the outcome is still the same.  She is old and sick and lonely and I just feel really shitty and angry and sad about it.

And that's it.

It's what she would always say.

Whether it was a casual visit or Thanksgiving, the question of, "What can I bring?" was always answered the same way:

"A bushel of fifties!"

This line is not reserved for just family.  Many a restaurant server who innocently asked if she needed anything else would hear this response. It's the kind of thing that would make all of us cringe, as we had all heard it a hundred times before and smiled politely everytime while silently wishing she'd never again utter those words.

Now, as her light seems to get a little dimmer everyday, as Alzheimers, like a thief in the night, has taken away her personality and memory and motorskills, I welcome any glimmer of her old self.  I look for signs that she is improving everytime I visit her, but they are not there. I have accepted the fact that all of the good memories I have of her have already been made.

My grandmother was born in 1929 to two Italian immigrants. She was one of eight children and once worked as a waitress in a diner where a man got drunk and fell asleep in his soup. I remember her telling me that story when I was a kid.

The woman I choose to remember is funny and tough, a fantastic card player, a wizard of Scrabble and crossword puzzels, a master of grilling, pie making, knitting, sewing and an avid watcher of "The Young and the Restless".  She treated her loved ones well but you would not want to get on her bad side.  She would hold a grudge beyond the point of absurd.  My own mother would often say to me while I was growing up, "Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?"  My grandmother was always more concerned with being right, which unfortunately for her, severly impacted her happiness.

As this is certainly the final chapter of her life I am doing what I can to make it as pleasant as possible, which of course does not feel like enough.  While I am afraid of her dying, I am more afraid of her living in this darkness and confusion indefinetly.