This is where I am.
I am acknowledging that I am visiting my grandmother less. Every week has turned into every other week and now more like every third week. It is the summer and the majority of my days from now til September will be spent at our little house at the beach, a place my grandmother got to visit once, shortly after we'd bought it when we rather ambitiously thought to have Thanksgiving for 16 people. It was a comedy of errors. Ran out of heating oil so the house was cold, no hot water, one fridge stopped working, dishwasher broke. I think we finally got the heat on, but it didn't matter. We did it, had our first grown up Thanksgiving with three kids and our friends and our families. And importantly for me, my grandma. I remember during dessert I sat down with her and had her sign all of the paperwork I had for her for the senior apartment complex we were moving her to a few weeks later. I was so hopeful for that move. She lasted less than nine months there.
The move to a new apartment shined a spotlight on her disease. She could no longer hide behind memorized movements and habitual living. She was unable to manage the simplest tasks, like remembering to eat the food we stocked her refrigerator with. She was extremely resistant to bathing, even when she'd promise to let me the night before a visit, by the next day she would dig in and the bath would never happen.
A fall landed her in the hospital and then a surgery made rehab necessary. It was from that facility that she was moved to the nursing home. She never went back to her apartment again. She didn't pack any of her things. One day she was there, in the two bedroom apartment with oddly furnished rooms, and the next day she was gone, never to return. In one room a bed she never slept in, favoring a recliner chair instead, and in the other room a desk that she was unable to pay bills at. She was such a watered down version of herself. And I was too inexperienced with Alzheimer's to really grasp just how much worse it would get.
In the almost two years she's been at the nursing home she has changed dramatically. The visits lately have become more difficult for me. It is hard to talk with her. She is less unhappy than she was, but now she is duller, more ambivalent about everything. Her motor skills have declined as has her speech, her ability to feed herself and her memory. All of this is expected, but that doesn't make it any less painful to watch it unfold.
I will visit her in exactly ten days from today. I will ask her questions about Thanksgivings from years ago, the ones she presided over with enormous turkeys and a dozen side dishes and an unbelievable amount of pies. She was an excellent cook and knew how to time out a dinner for a large group perfectly. One day I will throw a Thanksgiving as lovely as hers.
