Watercolors

Visiting my grandmother a few days ago I was struck by how much has been taken from her. Her possessions, her home, her dignity. This was a particularly good visit, certainly the best in the past six months. It was just her and I for two hours in her room, filling in her new calendar with family birthday, playing cards and laughing. It feels so good to laugh with her.

I noticed on this visit how few things she has and how the ones she has are mostly junk. For at least the past twenty years she's been giving away her possessions. Her Hummels, her good (okay decent) china, her christmas ornaments (that ceramic tree that lights up was always my favorite). You'd go to visit her at her apartment and leave with a crock pot and a Danielle Steele novel, a roasting pan and a set of golf clubs. She especially liked to give you back gifts you'd given her. I never read into it too deeply. Now it seems this, and many strange behaviors, were signs of dementia creeping in.

When I looked around her room I made mental notes of what she had: an old card (maybe from Easter), a cheap fleece blanket, some framed photos, a pile of tattered magazines, a stack of two dozen plastic cups that she saves from when she's brought her pills. Looking at everything made me feel slightly ill, almost anxious. Her existence has become so small that she operates the same way a homeless person would, just collecting and keeping little scraps of this and that.

In many ways she is like a homeless person. Displaced, both physically and mentally from what she once had and knew. I told my mother that my grandma is now like a watercolor painting, everything soft and muted and so very vague, no sharpness or definition. And yet still so much beauty.