Yesterday was one of those visits with my grandmother that reminded me: this disease is progressive, it never gets better and it’s my job to find something good, even on the bad days.
We sat outside for most of our hour long visit. I feel guilty that all I am able to give her is one hour every other week. She deserves more from me than that. Traffic was really bad and I was in the car for five hours roundtrip to make that hour visit happen. And while I am driving, I think of the other things I should also be doing in that time: working, seeing my mother, cleaning my house, answering emails, cutting my dog’s nails, writing. Writing always seems to be last on the list.
She was happy to sit outside and snack on the croissant and fruit salad I had brought for her and soak up the sun. Before we went outside, I had to run to her room. I left her in her wheelchair in the hallway with strict instructions to not move while I was gone. I placed a potted plant, some black licorice and a picture of the kids on her window sill. I knew by the time she saw them after lunch, an hour after I’d gone, that she would very likely not know who they were from. And that’s okay with me. I’m more concerned that she enjoy them than recall where they came from.
On this visit I found her confused, but calmer and less agitated than usual. When I entered the activities room to collect her and take her outside, she stared at me for a very long time before registering who I was. It is always my biggest fear, that day when I arrive and it never registers who I am. The day I become just another kind stranger that enters her room and knows her name and brings her a danish. That day is coming. Or she will die first. Those are the only two options that Alzheimers has left us with.
Back home last night I found myself thinking about my dad a lot, a person that, despite struggling with and dying from drug addiction when I was three, my grandmother has not ever had a bad word to say about. And if you know my grandmother, a woman who never has been one to hold back telling you her opinion on anything, you would know how remarkable that was. And how it speaks volumes about the character of my father and my grandmother’s unexpected capacity to love. My grandmother’s life has been in excess of fifty years longer than my father’s was. My brain has a hard time computing that, knowing all the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren that my grandmother has experienced, and knowing that my father missed out on all of that.
For a (thankfully) brief period around the age of twelve I held to the fantasy that my father was not really dead. I imagined that he was alive and living in Paris and one day I would see him. I think I’d heard a story about someone thinking Jim Morrison wasn’t really dead and I applied that to my dad. Grief comes in all shapes and sizes and changes as time goes by. The grief I have experienced in losing my grandmother little by slowly has also changed as the months and now years have passed. I am trying to be present and to not grieve for something I have not yet lost. She is still here and there is still life left in her and I plan on enjoying all she has to offer until the very end.
