Kill 'em with kindness

Having a restaurant is more than just serving food. It's more than just four walls that house hungry people for a few minutes of their busy day. At least it should be. It should be an opportunity to bring people together, to feed their bellies and their souls, to become a part of their lives, a memory that they look back fondly upon.

This morning I was at the diner and a dad walked in with his son and checked his wallet and promptly realized he didn't have cash on him. I heard him as he turned to his kid and said "we'll come back next time buddy" and they walked out. I was sitting in the front window sipping a coffee while Maggie read a book and after hesitating for a second I dashed out after them. 

"Hey!" I shouted at him, "Come back in. Come eat, pay tomorrow. You're here and he's hungry, don't leave." He looked a little shocked but said yes and thank you and led his boy back inside to a table and they proceeded to order and eat the breakfast they'd both biked here for. When Maggie and I left he stopped me and introduced himself and thanked me. It was really my pleasure, I told him, and it really was. 

On the walk home Maggie asked me what the guy was saying to me. I explained that he didn't have money on him and that I told him to come eat and pay tomorrow. Maggie said wow mom, that's really nice. I told her that you never win when you play dirty and you can never go wrong with kindness, a lesson I hope she holds onto for a long time. 

There have been moments in my life when I hesitated to do a kind thing, and then it was too late, and I never got to. Holding the door for someone, listening when someone needs an ear, buying a kid at the playground an ice cream who's parents don't have cash on them, all opportunities I don't want to miss. I want my kids to learn this lesson over and over again til it's their mantra: you can never go wrong with kindness. 

Side note about this blog: I considered shutting it down after my grandmother died, but have decided not to. This place I've come to for the past few years to write has been special to me and I don't want it to end. Life is still happening and I want to acknowledge that. So here I am, still typing away. Thank you for being here with me. 

Obituary

Below you will find the obituary that I wrote for my grandmother with input from my family. It will soon appear in the local paper with information about services.

Josephine Antona Mancino, the second youngest of eight children, was born January 14th, 1929 in
Washingtonville, New York. Her parents Josephine Tacchella and Marziano Antona both entered America through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. Josephine graduated from Washingtonville High School in 1946 and settled in nearby Monroe where she married Ralph Mancino (deceased 1991), also a first generation child of Italian immigrants. They were married for over forty years and had four children: Ralph Mancino (Carla Henry), Theresa Brodzik (Bill) , Josephine Papagni (Shabazz Jackson) and Catherine Hutchins (William, deceased), that they raised on the same block that many of Ralph's siblings lived on. She was a devoted grandmother to her five grandchildren, Demian, Matthew, Blair, Devon and Tyler. She also had five great-grandchildren she took great pride in: Dylan, Maggie, Crosby, Samantha and Jack, and many nieces and nephews.  She is survived by her sister Marguerite Re and brother Joseph Antona. She was predeceased by her brother Piero (Peter) Antona; sisters: Bianca Floriano, Louise Lee, Mary Myszelow, Laura Barley, and Theresa Barbieri.

She worked for many years at Highland Telephone Company just steps from her home on Elm Street, retiring in 1987 to care for her husband and play Gin Rummy with her neighbors, Eugene and Antoinette Moran. On summer evenings they enjoyed back yard "cake and coffee" with the very large Elm Street Mancino family and friends. They often spent weekends on Cherry Pie Lane at Bakers Acres on the Jersey Shore, sharing meals and many laughs with the Scherne family. She remarried in 1994 to George Rowe and divided her time between New York and Florida for over a decade.

She was a talented seamstress, a self taught cook and a master at crossword puzzles. She was always
available to talk, except from 12:30-1:30 every week day, when she would draw the curtains and watch "The Young and The Restless".

The family asks in lieu of flowers that donations be made to the Alzheimer's Association.

How to say goodbye?

I have sat down at my computer to try and write a eulogy for my grandmother and I don't know where to begin. How do I sum up a lifetime of loving someone in a few paragraphs?  How do I make people understand that, beneath her cranky, opinionated exterior, she was kind and funny and so special to me?

Sometimes when people die, it seems they are immediately sainted by those they left behind.  I will not be doing that. It would be a disservice to her to suddenly describe her as a sweet old lady that always had a kind word for everyone.  That was not the case.  She was not everyone's friend, but she was mine. She had opinions about things, even if they were based on nothing more than her unexamined beliefs. She was a Catholic who liked to go to church on Saturday night to get it out of the way.  Much of what she did was based on a feeling of duty and on being a disciplined person.

As a kid, she was the best person to take care of me when I was sick.  She would make up the couch into a cozy bed, hang a little plastic bag off the edge of the cushion (she would not tolerate my tissues making a mess of her floor) and make sure I had lots of fluids to drink in a tall glass, sensibly rested atop a coaster as to not leave a water mark on the wooden end table. When I woke up she'd fix me soup or grilled cheese or anything else I asked for. This was how she showed her love best: through food.

I'm not sure what I will say about her when I stand up in a few days, but I'm sure of what I want people to know. I want them to know she loved people and was loved in return, however imperfectly it came across. She did the best she could with the time she was here and that's really all we can hope for.

Revoir ma reine

Below is what I wrote this morning but did not get a chance to post. Since writing this my dear grandmother has left us. I want to believe the speed of her departure means her physical suffering was brief. I will miss her terribly.

-------------------

A missed call from my mother this morning followed by a text that read: call me when you get a chance. I dialed immediately and heard the news I was dreading. My grandmother is not doing well, "taken a turn for the worse" is how the nurse that called my mother described it.

I am in Long Island this weekend and my first instinct is to drive upstate. My mom kindly reminded me that this knee jerk reaction would not be supported by grandmother. She would want me to do all the things I had planned already to do with the kids today. A fair in a nearby town, a salamander hunt tonight with a local museum, a late night movie. She has always, since I had children, emphasized her desire for me to always put them first.

I will get an update from my mom later today when she visits my grandmother after work. Based on this report, I will take the train up tomorrow or Monday. My fear is not that she will die, that is inevitable. My fear is that she will spend the remainder of her life before she dies in pain and that her Alzheimer's will take over completely and she will die surrounded by family, but still alone.

Wishing for her peace and a painless journey to the other side, when ever that might be.

9/11/2015

The train was just a little quieter this morning, the way it was in the days and weeks that followed the towers falling, all of late September of 2001 was quiet. Even when Letterman came back on the air, and held our collective hand, and let us know we would indeed laugh again, that our broken hearts would one day heal, it was still quiet.

The man across from me on the train had a tie on with the towers on it and an eagle and a boat the looked like Columbus was sailing it. It made me want to laugh. And cry.

Reading Flannery O'Connor this morning, standing, swaying with motions of the train, I found a few lines that felt so appropriate for today.

"The way things happened, one thing after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn't tell if you were young or old."

Karla

How do you say goodbye to your mother? The person whose love was unconditional, whose advice was unsolicited, whose knowledge of life was underestimated by you for so long, til you grew up and had your own children and saw how wise and fearless and kind she truly was.

Two years ago my friends had to do just that. Their mother, the mother to so many, her own children and dozens of foster children over several decades, took her last breath. Cancer is a nasty, unfair, unrelenting disease that she fought against as good as anyone ever had.  She was brave and strong and able to hang on so much longer than any doctor thought possible. She was a miracle.

Karla Scherne was many things to many people, but to me she was always the lady who lived up the street who was there, in my house, with my mother and my grandmother, the night I was born in the middle of a blizzard. She let me come into her house, eat her food, borrow her movies, swim in her pool, be in her life. She was one of the good ones, one of the very special. We lost an amazing woman two years ago today. If I close my eyes, I think I can hear her sewing machine humming away in heaven.

Not over yet

I wrote the section below a few weeks ago after a particularly difficult time for my grandmother and decided not to post it. Two days after writing it I visited her and it was so bad I didn't even want to write about it, which was a first for me. And then this week I went to see her, and much to my surprise, she was doing better. It is difficult to put into context how much better she is doing unless you understand how she was not too long ago. Yes, she still has Alzheimer's and is, quicker than I'd like, losing most of her memory, but she is also still fighting to hang on, and that is worth remembering.

Written on August 7, 8pm:

I think it is all going to be over soon.

The last chapter is being written in the very long, sometimes sad, often funny, story of my grandmother's life. She is currently retaining water at an alarming rate. She is on antibiotics for an infection and is having congestive heart failure. She is the least healthy she's been since being diagnosed with Alzheimers.

I feel sad as always I suppose, for her and for my mother and for what I'm soon to lose, what I've already lost, all of the intangible love that I feel for her that she can no longer comprehend. And on some level, relief I guess, that she might soon be at peace. And then, when I imagine a world in which she no longer exists, I feel panic, at her death and what that means, the deeper meaning that one day my mother will die and I will die and suddenly I'm in a morbid death spiral and the world is ending.

I haven’t seen her in a month, by far the longest I’ve gone without seeing her in the past few years.  The possibility of her not recognizing me when I see her this Sunday is very real, and yet, I am not afraid. I am anxious to see her, hoping for the best but preparing myself for a very different woman to be waiting for me.

Weeks and weeks

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.

til the very end

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. 

Shadows

You can live your whole life as one person and die as another. As a shadow.  My grandmother is alive, but so many parts of her are gone and will never return. I fear one day I will enter her room and we will be strangers to each other. That she will be the shadow.

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.

Heaven

"What do you think happens when we die?" I asked her, as we sat across from each other, playing our third and final hand of solitaire before lunch.

"I don't know" she said. "Nothing?"

‘Nothing' is such a bleak thought. I can't accept that we live all of our years here on earth and when it's all over it is followed by nothing. I asked her if she was afraid of dying and she said no. No? She is 86 and presumably far closer to death than I am, and I am obsessed with dying, like some sort of cliqued Woody Allen character, I lay awake at night and am laser focused on what will happen after I've taken my last breath.

I asked her if she believed in heaven and she said she supposed she did. We talked about what she would want there waiting for her: my grandfather, a gin and tonic, soft shell crabs and dancing were all on the list.

The whole conversation made me want to scream at the top of my lungs. The room smelled of feces as it had for the entire hour I'd been sitting there, despite my two requests to please have someone come in and clean her up. I try to be nice to the nurses because I know their jobs are tough and also, I feel if I'm nice to them then they are nice to her.

I wanted to record her talking about death and family and what she remembers about her life, but I was conflicted. Even if she gave consent, she doesn’t really understand what she’s consenting to. I want to have videos of her to remember her by after she is gone, but the truth is I have a fantastic memory, from what I had for lunch in first grade to what shirt my husband was wearing on our first date. I don’t need a video to remember her voice, especially her voice now, which is often slow and slurring its words.

When she is gone to heaven to dance with my grandpa and golf all day, I will remember her the way she was, driving her cadillac too fast and brushing my hair too hard and giving her unsolicited and often inappropriate opinions to everyone. I will remember her tucking me in at night when I slept over, making me mashed potatoes with the perfect little well of gravy in the middle, holding my hand when we played cards.

I don’t know what I’d hoped she would say to me about death, what possible wisdom I was looking for her to impart to me. I guess I wanted her to tell me to not be afraid, that everything would be okay. I told her I was scared, that the idea that one moment you are alive, and like a light switch that’s been flicked off, everything goes dark and its over. I said all of this to her and she just looked at me and said “Yes, like a light switch.” And smiled. And played her next card. And with that our only talk ever about death was over.

Storms

I checked my email today and was delighted to find something from one of my childhood friends, my neighbor growing up, my first and only babysitter. The daughter of the tall, beautiful woman who paced around nervously on her toes in my parent's tiny summer cabin of a house the day I was born, smack in the middle of March and a blizzard.

Tracy wrote to her sister and me to share her feelings, which like mine tend to skew nostalgic and sentimental, on winter storms. If you grew up where we did, on a private dirt road populated by a handful of families in modest houses situated between two lakes, then you might feel the way we do about storms. Respectful. Worshipful. Loving. We see the value in a good storm.

We each lamented in our own way our inability to recreate this winter wonderland for our children. When we were their ages we were bundled tightly in mismatched outer wear, rarely were we the first one to wear anything, and sent outside to play. Those were truly the only instructions ever given. Go play.

Our kids are spoiled. All of them. We have spoiled them with our best intentions, our fatter wallets, our two parent homes, where both mom and dad are involved in all aspects of their lives.

My friend Tracy wrote about snow days far better than I ever could, with wit and humor my writing often lacks. Find a portion of her email below, I hope she doesn't mind me sharing it:

"These lame snowstorms make me feel like an old man: When I was a kid, we would be lucky if we got a two-hour delay! The buses could barely make it up the hill to get to school and would then slowly slide down that same hill on the way home. And the kids all cheered with joy. And if we did have a snow day, there was no TV watching or iPad playing. No, we would play outside until our Kmart mittens were covered in ice chunks. Our parents didn’t run outside if the triplets hit us in the face with an ice ball - that’s right… not a snow ball, an ice ball. We were left to navigate our sleds down the hill, steeling ourselves to get the winded knocked out of us after attempting to slide through the path of pricker bushes that lead to the steep jump that my older brother had built. And the wind did get knocked out of us and we cheered for joy! Our skin would be cold, wet and red when we got inside, but we didn’t get frostbite, or catch pneumonia. We just drank our watery hot cocoa and cheered for joy. Kids these days."

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.

She would have laughed

I have avoided writing about my grandmother lately, feeling I have nothing left to say on the subject. Once every fourteen days I see her. For an hour or two I sit across from her and force conversation and speak louder than is normal and keep a cheerful tone. I watch her eat food she isn't even tasting. We talk about things that aren't really happening and don't talk about things that are.

I feel like there's nothing left of her, of the person she once was. I tell myself she still knows who we are, even if peripherally, and that is positive. She plays solitaire on a little table in her room with a deck of cards that is missing a few, a joke hidden in there I see and choose to smile at. She would have, the old her, the sharp her who would not recognize herself today. She would have laughed at the joke.

Goodbye Gus

Yesterday I learned that someone I knew not very well but always liked very much had died. I found myself sadder than one should be over the death of someone they did not know intimately, was neither a family member nor a close friend to and I thought about why this was. He, like me, was a restaurant owner and he lived it in every breath he took.  Watching him greet his regulars, embrace them like family, remember their orders....it was a thing of beauty.

I think the truth of it is I see myself and my husband and my grandmother in his story. I am reminded that my grandmother will likely soon die, that one day the restaurants my husband and I own will be closed, meals there eaten by those that came faithfully to our counters but a memory. I am reminded of the impermanence of everything. 

Life has a way of marching on, through death and illness and the little silly stuff in life that seems so big and is always quickly forgotten. The passing of Gus reminds me of what I want my life to be, the imprint I want to make while I am here. The very best part of owning restaurants is being allowed to be a part of other people's lives, the special moments and the ordinary ones. Looking back on one’s life, I think the ordinary moments become the special ones.  Like all the mornings I spent at that diner that Gus' family had since the beginning of time, often hungover, eating eggs and drinking coffee and planning ways to make my life better, those ordinary moments have become special to me.  Rest in peace dear Gus. 

Carmela

I don't embrace her the same way I used to, a fact that causes me shame. As a child I was like a lap cat with my grandmother. When I got too big to sit in her lap I'd settle for sitting on the floor and resting my head in her lap or sitting next to her and holding her hand. Now when I go to see her, I kiss her on her forehead, not on her cheek or on the lips. I hug her, but awkwardly so because of her wheelchair.

Many memories I have are associated with smell, the smells of pies baking and leaves burning and coffee brewing early in the morning. My grandmother smells like a stranger to me. Her skin feels differently, her hair is almost always unbrushed.

There is a sweet little old lady named Carmela at the nursing home who always says hello to me when I come. She likes my kids and they like her. I overheard her telling someone today that I was Josephine's granddaughter. "She comes all the time and has a lot of children" is how she described me. It made me smile. I often look at her enviously, wishing my grandma could be more like her. She is so kind, 90 years old and very with it, chatting and smiling in her neat little cardigan, not cheap with a smile or a wave.

My grandmother is cranky and anti-social and always remembering less. She yelled at me today to not bring my son (who I had left at home) until I brushed his hair.  She obsessed with everyones hair. Mine is always too long and usually the wrong color for her. My kids act like I'm trying to kill them when I try and run a comb through their hair, so that's a fight I save for school days.

I left today's visit feeling a twinge of guilt, feeling like I'd rushed through my visit, just kind of went through the motions. I was finding it hard to carry both ends of the conversation, which is usually the case. She was never really like kind old Carmela with a heart open to everyone. She was more guarded. A tougher nut to crack. But with her and I it was always different, so easy. We have always been like two old friends that could pick up where the other one left off, sharing meals and jokes and the love of "The Golden Girls".  Sitting with her today, I wanted her to pick up where I left off, but those days are long gone.

Hello Stranger

She sits in her chair staring out the window, back to the door, hunched forward. I find her this way every time I visit. The nurse I pass in the hall advises me that she is "feeling blue". My mother and I wait in the doorway and send in my son first, holding her cinnamon raisin bagel with cream cheese, and watch as he runs to her and she turns and smiles at him. While all of the dots have stopped connecting for her, she knows she's happy to see him. She knows he is the same little boy she has pictures of on her windowsill. She does not remember his name.

This visit marked a significant decline in my grandmother. While what happened yesterday or five years ago has been out of her mental grasp for sometime, she has also begun to forget the past almost completely. She turned to my mother and said "My husband has passed away, right?" We both remained straight faced and my mother said yes, in 1991. She did not remember the details of his open heart surgery in 1976, or our time spent at Bakers Acres campground with the Schernes and the Ingrams. These are all things that, very recently, we were able to talk about.

Physically she did not seem great either, her ankles were very swollen and when we suggested she might need to be cleaned up before we took her upstairs, she was adamant that she did not, despite the fact that our noses told us other wise. I looked in her drawers (something that still feels strange, just going through her things) for a brush to tidy up her hair and when I couldn't locate one she informed me that people were stealing her things. They have long arms around here she announced. I told her I'd buy here a new one but that didn't seem to make her very happy.

Alzheimer's is so very cruel, it takes and takes until there's nothing left. I worry about what it will look like for her at the end, will she die before she forgets everything? Will she know who I am at the end? She is increasingly a stranger to me that I treat with love and kindness, but have a hard time finding things to talk with her about. I love her just the same, but I ache to have the old her back.

This Summer

This summer is drawing near to it's inevitable end and I find myself feeling reflective about what I did and who I did it with and what I wish I'd done better.  In June I looked at the calendar and saw many an empty week and wondered what I'd fill it with. The kids were not signed up for camp, no big plans were made and my attitude was very play it by ear. On any given week I could be at the beach house, in Brooklyn or up at my mom's. In fact, my friends would often text me "You around? Beacon? Shirley?", knowing those were the three spots I cycled through all summer long, never unpacking my blue back pack I lugged everywhere, transporting in it my laptop, an iPad, contacts, my array of Kiehl's products I recently decided I can't live without, snacks, a clean t-shirt, bandaids for the inevitable kid injury and pair of awesome headphones Josh bought for himself that I promptly stole.

This summer I feel deeply in love with my family. On a daily basis they pushed me to my limit and tested my dwindling patience and made me scream and shout and get it all out and blew my mind with their level of awesomeness. They have shown me unspeakable acts of kindness towards one another and deep insight into what makes me tick. They get me. And I get them. I looked at my husband many times this summer and felt profoundly grateful to be on this ride with him. Making babies and raising these little people and running our restaurants and witnessing our older family age. All of the little intimate and ordinary details of my everyday are shared with him and I can think of no one better to be in that position in my life.

This summer reminded me I can not be in two places at once, it echoed to me the sentiment my mother has always told me : the best gift you can give someone is your time. Everytime I went to visit my grandmother, whether alone or with one of my kids, I tried to have an experience with her. I tried to just hold the moment with her and leave my expectations at the door. I know in her own way, she appreciates the visits as much as I enjoy visiting her.

This summer I said good bye to people who had been in my life a combined 12 plus years, to a manager, a book keeper, my hair dresser. I watched a friend's marriage fall apart. I gave up on losing five pounds. I obsessed over getting the perfect lunch boxes for the girls' for school. I dyed my hair brown. I liked who I was this summer and I am crazy about all the people I got to spend it with, friends who visited me at the beach and hung out with me in Brooklyn and had moments with me. I loved all of our shared experiences. Thank you for that.

Rain Drops Keep Fallin On My Head

Last night I dreamt of packing up my grandmother's things, not like we did, from her final sad apartment that she spent less than a year living in. The apartment I tried cheerfully and desperately to convince her was great when we toured it together, the week after Thanksgiving 2012. In my dream we were back in the house she shared with my grandfather and everything was still intact, the house and her memory and my heart.

The contents of her bedroom were all there. The dark, oversized bedroom set, her satin lined jewelry box with its mix of heirloom and costume jewelry. Her oval mirror always sat atop her dresser and kept organized her perfume, powder and brushes. My most cherished trinket in her room was her tiny music box that, when opened, played "Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head". She used to wind it up and set it on her dresser while she brushed my hair to distract me. When I awoke from my dream I could smell her bedroom, and my first thought was of that song. Many of her favorite singers had done versions of this song and I'd probably heard them all: Engelbert Humperdink, Perry Como, Andy Williams. Listening to old music and playing cards was how we passed our afternoons. How lucky we were.




                                        "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head"

[Originally by B. J. Thomas]

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head
Just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed
Nothing seems to fit
Oh, raindrops keep fallin' on my head
Keep a-fallin'

Cause I just done me some talking to the sun
And I said I didn't like the way he got things done
Sleeping on the job
Oh, raindrops keep fallin' on my head
Keep a-fallin'

But there's one thing I know
The blues they send to meet me
Won't defeat me
It won't be long till happiness
Comes up to greet me
To greet greet greet greet me

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head
But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turning red
Crying's not for me
Cause I ain't gonna stop the rain by complaining

Raindrops keep fallin' on my head
But that doesn't mean my eyes will soon be turning red
Crying's not for me
Cause I ain't gonna stop the rain by complaining

Because I'm free
Nothing's bothering me
Because I'm free
Nothing's bothering me
Because I'm free
Nothing's bothering me
Because I'm free
Nothing's bothering me

The Dying Light

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

I can not write about my most recent visit to my grandmother without first acknowledging the tragic passing of Robin Williams. I heard, like most everyone did, early last night that he had taken his life, at the age of 63. The fact that he was a father and a husband and a genius and 63, each one of these facts makes it all somehow sadder to me. I am reminded that life is fragile and to be kind to everyone, as we are all fighting our private battles in life.

My grandmother's battle is her disappearing memory, her erratic behavior, her loneliness. Alzheimer's is winning, as it always does. My visit with her on Sunday was not particularly good. I found her agitated and grouchy and mostly uncooperative. I am not alarmed by this as I recognize that it is all perfectly normal. Good mood or bad, I continue on with my plan for her when I visit, a snack, a game of cards, then upstairs to the activities room, despite her very vocal protests. She's not a joiner of activities she tells me. you are now, I tell her.

It's almost like I've had two grandmother's in my life: the woman I grew up with, who braided my hair too tight and fed me too much and taught me to play cards, And the other: the one I have I've watched forget birthdays and names and what she had for breakfast. I fully love the woman she is now and very much miss the person she used to be.