Mashed Potatoes?

I went to visit yesterday during lunch, my least favorite time to be there. If I am being totally honest, and what's the point of being anything else when writing, the smells and sounds and sight of all of the old people eating grosses me out. It always smells like urine and brown gravy. My grandmother constantly tries to feed me or my kids if we are there during a meal. At least ten times in as many minutes I had to politely tell her them my two year old son who was squirming in my lap in fact did not want any of her mashed potatoes or creamed spinach. And no, neither would I like you to give him any of the ginger ale from your tiny wine glass. And like a magician, she manages to pull a small  brush out from behind her back and begin to try and comb through the halo of knotty ginger hair surrounding his face. Perhaps if he had napped he would have been more receptive to this, but I doubt it. Hair brushing is on the top of his two year old shit list, right up there with mittens and getting his face wet.

It was one of the more exhausting trips for me. A nursing home is a difficult place to bring children, something I am figuring out first hand. I know I need to learn to accept where she is at right now in her life and not need it to be different, not need her to be someone she simply is not. She is happier now than she was a year ago. She no longer asks to go home or clings to you when you hug her. She does not grasp what her life before the nursing home was and I am painfully aware at what a blessing this really is.

And as always, I am grateful that at least for now, when I walk into that diningroom that offends all my senses, she looks up and smiles and still knows who I am. And she looks happy. And that is all I can ask for.

Fuck Alzheimer's

Sometimes, when your grandmother has Alzheimer's, you have a visit that warms your heart and reminds you of all the good memories. You hold her soft, wrinkled hand in yours and you smile at one another over a game of gin rummy and a plate of cookies.

Today was not one of those visits.

I often struggle when writing this blog with attempting to be open and honest and at the same time being respectful of her privacy. I don't know how well I achieve either. Sometimes one negates the other.

Today she was disinterested in the visit, with my mom and my kids and myself. She introduced my mother and I to people with the same wrong name. I was overwhelmed by the smell of the nursing home. I think I was secretly grateful that she was more interested in bingo than her family.

When we exited the diningroom, tables quickly filling up with wheelchairs holding crumpled bodies, some with sweet smiles, others with vacant stares, I stole glances back to my grandmother's table and noted that not once did she look up. She did not seem to notice that we had left.

I am relieved in a sense that her life there is becoming normal to her and she has ceased fighting it, while at the same time I am heart sick that I am losing her to this fucking disease.