Good bye Uncle Mike

My grandfather's brother Mike passed away on Saturday. Their mother was Anella, the woman one of my restaurants was named after. He was born July 26th, 1927, and in a moment of life truly coming full circle, he died on his birthday at 87 years old. Below is an excerpt from his obituary, which does a great job of summing up his life in a few sentences.

Michael was a parishioner and an usher with Sacred Heart Church of Monroe and was a member of Teamsters Local #445 of Newburgh. He was Vice President of Mancino Trucking Company, Inc., the former President of Monroe Skating Paradise, a former member of Mombasha Fire Company, former member of Knights of Columbus Council #2079, and a former member of American Legion Post #488 of Monroe. He was a former Trustee for the Village of Monroe and retired as the Highway Superintendent with the Village of Monroe. Michael was a Veteran of the U.S. Army and served his country during World War II. 

Of course, an obituary only mentions the big stuff, the positions you held and places you worked and how many kids you had and which school you graduated from. It can never tell the full story. I'm sure he had dreams that were never realized and moments of beauty only he saw. In his 87 years surely his heart was broken many times and he took paths he later regretted. A life is made up of a million little moments, all colliding into each other and overlapping into a quilt of memories you have to reflect back on when you are older.  And perhaps this is what saddens me the most with my grandmother. Her quilt of memories is disintegrating everyday. It has decades worth of gaping holes.

I only knew my Uncle Mike as an old man (he was 53 when I was born, which for a kid may as well be 100) and always liked him. He lived two doors down from my grandparents on Elm Street in Monroe.  My grandpa and Uncle Mike's older brother Carl had the house in-between them and could be seen driving up and down the driveway in his car with his stick out the window. He was blind from diabetes and was permitted to pull the car up to the street. Not legally permitted, but apparently all the grown ups felt it was okay. As a little girl I knew to stay away from the driveway when Uncle Carl was driving.

As a teen I worked at a much loved deli in town, Monroe Bagels and Deli. Some of my uncles would come in for their morning coffee or a buttered roll in the afternoon, but Uncle Mike was the only one that tipped me, something that became a joke between me and my mom's brother. My boss at the deli Dave, seemed to know everyone, my family included, and I took mental note of how cool I thought that was. Many years later when I opened up my first restaurant I realized how very much like Dave I had become, in my work ethic and memory of all my regulars.

I will remember Uncle Mike as being funny and kind to me as a kid lying on his living room floor coloring while watching The Price is Right and as an awkward, bagel-slinging teen, grinning at his quarter tip. Rest in Peace Uncle Mike. I hope you are roller skating through heaven with a cup of coffee in your hand and a smile on your face.

East Mombasha kids

We were the kids of lovers. Of artists and painters and carpenters. Of adults with dreams we never knew, of lives we only saw parts of. Our parents were hippies and hunters and most of them smoked like chimneys. They went to work everyday and ate dinner with us each night. They chopped logs for our wood stoves and made us rake leaves til blisters decorated our tiny hands.

We fought with our siblings. We tattled to our parents and who ever else might listen. We fell asleep in the summer exhausted and covered in mosquito bites, greasy from Skin So Soft with hair smelling of citronella candles and firewood. There was no air conditioning, just a fan if we were lucky enough to get it.


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I mostly only use this space to write about my grandmother and my struggle with her slide into Alzheimer's. Yesterday I had the pleasure of having one of my childhood friends over to my mom's house for dinner. The Schernes and the Papagnis lived on the same dirt road for almost twenty years and we share a treasure trove of memories and stories of a childhood spent running through the same woods. Us children have all grown up and we now have families of our own. My mother is the only parent of the two families left and that breaks my heart.

I was driving away from my mom's house today alone when my phone rang. I glanced down and saw it was my mom calling and pulled over so I could answer it. She told me Maggie wanted me to come back. She really wanted to visit my grandma. So we hung up and I turned around and drove back and got my sweet middle child and drove with her to the nursing home, mostly in silence, thinking of the night before and how nice it had been.

A common theme with me lately seems to be the idea that life is going by so quickly. I see it in my children and how fast they grow. I see it in my grandma and her seemingly constant deterioration. I think about my life as a kid with a mixture of sadness and gratitude. All of it, my kids and my grandma and looking back on what was, makes me want to appreciate what I have now. I want these to be the days I look back on in twenty years and remember how wonderful they were.

Stay seated, hands inside the ride please

I don't care about anything anymore, she announced to me today. Deep breath, I told myself.

When I arrived it was nearly lunch time and I could see some of the residents had already taken their assigned seats at the dining room tables when I peeked in to see if she was there. She was not. I signed in and walked down the hallway, all the way to the end where her room is. Her bed was neatly made, topped with the quilt my aunt made for her, knitted from scraps of scarves and sweaters and holiday ornaments.  I walked back down to the nurses station and popped my head in the manager's office, a perfectly named woman: Dolores. She told me my aunt, the same one that knitted the quilt, had taken her up to the salon on the second floor to get her hair done.

Stepping off the elevator I could hear my aunt laughing and didn't have to guess which direction to go in.  My aunt and I helped the hair dresser take rollers out of a few of the ladies hair, and when everyone was brushed and hair-sprayed, we rode the elevator down one floor to have lunch. My aunt had gone ahead with Eileen, one of my grandma's table mates that I am particularly fond of. It was exiting the elevator when my grandma announced she no longer cared about anything. There's really not very much to say when she says something like that. I get it. This sucks and I don't blame her for not caring. Her moments of clarity are painful for her and for me.

During lunch Eileen declared that she lived alone and did not cook anymore, too much work she said, who can bother to cook for one person. Amen Eileen, I told her, I totally agree. My grandma told Eileen she wanted a cigarette. Me too, I chimed in. You smoke, Eileen asked my grandma, surprised. I'm 99% quit, my grandma told her. I enjoy this banter they have. It doesn't bother me, having the same conversation three times over soft chicken and strawberry ice-cream (no one wanted the pears for dessert, they never do).

There were moments in the meal that I felt a panic rising up, like I might start crying at the table. I always feel this way, slightly claustrophobic in the large room, this sadness that settles in when I look at her face. I push it down, but one day I'm afraid I won't be able to and I'll just start bawling in front of all of the blank faced old people.

I wheeled her and a friend of her's back to her room and reminded them over and over that no one was to try and get out of their wheel chairs. I put on The Young and the Restless and made sure the volume was correct. Okay, I said, turning to face both of them. Who's getting into bed?! No one, my grandma barked. Good job, I said, that was a test and you passed. Stay seated I said kindly but firmly.

A gentle kiss was planted upon her soft forehead and I left her to watch what the Newmans and the Abbotts were up to.

Sundowning

Sundowning, or sundown syndrome, is a common term used to refer to the agitation, anxiety and confusion that affects many Alzheimer's patients. It occurs later in the day and can continue into the night and even make sleeping difficult. My grandmother has not escaped this part of the disease. I try to keep my visits between ten a.m. and two p.m. Yesterday my visit, which included my mother and all three of my kids, began at four p.m. I knew this would not be easy.

I can remember the exact moment when I knew that my grandmother was in trouble. I remember the phone call when I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. When I hung up the phone and cried and called my mother. It was one night in February, almost a year and a half ago, when I had called my grandma and asked her what she had for dinner. It was a common question for us, talking about meals and what we had cooked or would cook the next day. This time when I asked her what she had for dinner she said she didn't know. I was confused how she didn't know, she always ate at five thirty. She then asked me what time it was and I told her seven. Seven at night or seven in the morning, she asked. I felt a real sinking feeling. It's night time gram, I told her, you must have dozed off in the chair. I made light of it with her and immediately called my mom when we hung up.

Summertime makes my weekly visits become every two week visits, which is why I had to squeeze in a visit with my kids in the afternoon. She was disturbed by the noise the kids made and she was afraid they could get hurt if they ran in the hallway. I wore a dress and put my hair up but she didn't seem to notice. She was intent, as she always is, on brushing the kids' hair. She wasn't able to locate her brush and that upset her. She didn't want to see the movie showing after dinner because she claimed she'd already seen it (even though she didn't actually know what movie was playing, she was certain she'd seen it).

I left the nursing home feeling a little sad and defeated. And guilty. I get frustrated when she doesn't behave the way I want her to. Some of the other residents who always sit by the nurses station, tucked into their wheel chairs in homemade sweaters, are sweet and always smile at me when I come in. They sit together. I want that for her, rather than passing the hours and days sitting in her room alone doing jig saw puzzles. But it's not for me to decide how she lives what's left of her life. All I can do is keep showing up. And love her. That's it.

Next time I'll wear a ball gown

She didn't want to leave her room today. My usually offensive hair (long, wild, unbrushed) went unnoticed by her today, her focus shifting to my unforgivable choice in pants. Now in retrospective, I should have known better. These were text book 'grandma will hate these' pants: baggy, torn, faded, knees completely blown out, just hanging off me.  She took breaks from asking to brush my two year old son's hair to mention how terrible I looked.  I told her that she could brush my son's hair after she let me brush her hair, which she nodded would be fine.

We decided to go sit outside and she hemmed and hawed a little about leaving her room and my mother and I realized she was worried what the old ladies who lined the hallway would think, the ones who sat chatting quietly in their wheelchairs, waiting for it to be time for the next meal, the main activity at the nursing home. I teased her and promised that the next time I visited I would wear a ball gown. She smiled and laughed at me and my mother watched us, as she often does when my grandmother and I are together, quietly, taking it all in. She has been front and center for the magical relationship my grandmother and I have shared for the past three decades. She understands my pain in losing her to Alzheimers like no other person can. 

I want to turn back time and have it be the summer of '86 or '87, when my grandpa was still well enough to go the beach and my grandmother still smoked menthols and played cards with the neighbors and she fed me and bathed me and brushed my hair.  I want to go back to a time when she held my hand while we played cards, not because she needed to, but because an extra squeeze reminded me how much she loved. I want to sleep on her couch again, on cool sheets, as I hear her quietly snoring in the room next door.  I want to be ten years old again in her kitchen, peeling apple after apple, carefully piling the peels in a neat little mound, preparing pies for Thanksgiving.

When I look at her, I see who she is today, but also who she was, all those years and all of those things we did together.  I am so lucky, to have been taught how to play gin rummy by a champ and make a pie by a fantastic baker. So thankful for all she has taught me.

Victoria Newman

I know when she's about to say it. When she's been looking at me too long in silence and squints her eyes in confusion. I wait for it. Never really insulted, more amused by the conviction she has for her feelings.

'What have you done to your hair?'

She asks me this every time I visit her despite the fact that my hair has not changed very much in the past year. She is insistent that she does not like it.

'I don't understand. What color do you want it to be?'

When I was a kid we would watch 'The Young and Restless' and often my grandma would try and do my hair like one of the main characters on the show, Victoria Newman. It always turned out very nice but she pulled it so tight it was hard to blink my eyes. I was the only ten year old with a natural facelift.

In an effort to make the most of whatever time I have left with her brain, I have begun to dig deeper in our visits. Today for the first time I acknowledged to her that she does not remember stuff from three years ago, and that is okay. I suggested that maybe she remembers things better that happened twenty years ago.

So sitting there outside in the sun, my mom sitting on the grass with my son, my grandmother sitting across from me holding my hand, I asked her if she remembered visiting one of my restaurants a few years ago. She said she did not. Don't worry about it, I told her. What about going to the Jersey Shore, I said. Bakers Acres (the campground where we stayed)? John and Karla? Ginny and Gary? Deep sea fishing and beer and pizza? Yes, she said and smiled and squeezed my hand. Those were good times, she told me.

We talked about the cars she had with my grandfather (always Cadillacs) and I recited for her the colors: mint green, green leather interior (my favorite), gold with tan leather interior (the one she had when my grandpa died) and so on. We went over the colors of the rugs in all of the upstairs bedrooms before her house became two apartments. I took off the ring she gave me, the one my grandfather gave her for a wedding anniversary many, many moons ago, and slid it as far as it would go on her finger and watched her smile at it.

'Make sure the stones don't fall out' she told me. I asked her if they ever had. Well no, she said. I laughed. The ring is close to fifty years old. I think those stones are staying put I told her and gave her a big hug.

Missing her tonight and feeling the weight of it all, the sadness and the joy of watching her last chapter be written. Mostly though I just feel lucky, to have been there and have shared so much with her and now, when she falters and struggles to put together the pieces of a specific memory, I can be there to help her, to remind her of all the beauty that we've seen together.

Having it All

When I was in third grade, my grandmother was 59, the same age my mother is now. When I was in third grade I thought my grandmother was old and couldn't imagine that she had once been my age. And when I was in third grade, my mother was the same age I am now. And my definition of what is old has shifted greatly in that time, so that now my 59 year old mother seems more like a sister to me, a peer. And my oldest child is now in third grade, and suddenly I am feeling old, questioning if I can still wear leather pants or halter tops, or if those days have passed.

I visited my grandmother this morning, another quick midweek visit, and in being there, I missed my daughter reading aloud a poem she wrote to her class. Her father went and took pictures and sent them to me, and yet I was still so sad to have missed it. Perhaps because of the state of my grandmother, or maybe I am prone to being melancholy, but lately I am acutely aware of how quickly life is racing by. I spent too many years sad and intoxicated and just burning daylight. With sobriety I gained a new found respect for time and that has been amplified in the past few years with the rapid growth of my children and simultaneous deterioration of my grandmother.

I know that my struggle to find balance in my life is neither unique to me nor a problem I will soon solve. I want to have it all, and my idea of what that means has changed drastically as I've gotten older. Having it all, at this stage of my life, simply means spending as much times as possible with my family, while still maintaining a career and meaningful relationships with a few close friends. That's it. That's what having it all means to me.