Yesterday was one of those visits where I played the role of observer, sitting back while my mother and children interacted with my grandmother. I had to search her room for a deck of cards that should have been easy to find and was frustrated at the state of her room. She keeps packing up her belongings, putting everything in shopping bags and tying up the top, convinced that she's going home soon. I bought her CDs to listen to and instead they are in a box, with crossword puzzles she can no longer do and magazines she doesn't read. I eventually found the cards and watched as my grandmother and my oldest daughter played two handed solitaire, like watching myself play with her twenty five years ago.
I have paused recently on coming to this space to write and instead have begun to explore writing fiction, cautiously following a dream I didn't, til recently, even know that I had. I only really began writing two years ago as a way to deal with what was happening to my grandmother. Watching a friend of mine write her way through her mother's battle with cancer, dealing with the very stark reality of her mother's death, navigating hospice, coming to terms with her own mortality. She was incredibly honest with her feelings and I knew if I was going to write, I'd need to do the same. That is what I've tried to achieve here for the past almost two years, balancing a respect for my grandmother's privacy with my need to share my experience. More often than not the things I've shared have been sad and unpleasant and uncomfortable. And completely honest.
I have never lost someone like this before, so slowly, so piece by piece. I often have the urge to tell the nurses how amazing she was, how before landing in the land of soft chicken and adult diapers, she cooked three hot meals a day, she sewed me shorts without a pattern, she laid in bed with my grandpa and listened to the Mets lose on the radio. They have no idea that she was a force to be reckoned with. They will never know how crisply she made a bed or how perfectly she folded towels. She is now just another patient that they wheel to lunch and dress in the morning. My grandmother is the ghost of who she used to be, she haunts her own memories.
