Preface
This is my revised version of the second essay. It focuses on Dementia and my observations of it through my grandma. I hoped to replicate the gradual progression of the disease. This is extra; so do not feel obliged to read it, but if you do, I would love to hear feedback on it! Thanks! Hope you have a lovely day and weekend! : )Declining Dementia
Her attentive bright brown eyes gaze
straight into mine. Her smile exposes laugh wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her short wavy white hair frames her face against her
cleanly pressed white shirt and navy blue capris. She stands in front of the
lighted red brick fireplace. One hand by her side, the other embraces the hand
of her husband, who grins his rare smile straight ahead. She rests her head
against his arm. The camera flashes.
It had been September of my freshman
year of high school. My parents and grandparents were throwing a farewell party
for my sister, who was leaving for Cameroon in the Peace Corps. In the kitchen
my grandma helped assemble appetizers with my mom as Jessica answered the questions
about Africa that Granddad asked, and I talked to Grandma about English and
high school.
“How’s your crocheting going?”
“Good.”
“Jessica, how’s English going? Do
you like your teacher? What books are you reading?”
“It’s fine. . . . He’s fine. . . .
We’re discussing To Kill a Mockingbird.”
My dad called us over to the family
room with camera in hand. We were going to remember this day. We would be able
to send pictures with her and maybe use this as the family photo for Christmas
cards. We lined the four of us together, took one with my grandparents and my
sister, and then one with just my grandparents.
The photo sat on the table across from
her white bed. The windows were decorated with shamrocks, and Valentine’s Day
cards lay on the windowsill. I closed the door and returned to my grandparents
and parents at the end of the hall. In the wheelchair, Grandma’s brown eyes appeared
tired and glassy, the way a child’s eyes are when sick with the flu. Her
wrinkled white top stained with brown food and wet drool matched her disheveled
white hair. She mumbled non-coherent words and kept her head down against her
shoulder.
For a
couple months before that fall of my freshman year of high school, my parents had
suspected that Grandma had dementia. This was not the first time that she had
confused me for Jessica or forgotten small little things: her favorite
books, birthdays of her grandchildren, dates of main holidays or even how to
crochet. She had always been very astute, the constant teacher and observer.
For her to forget something was not normal. Initially we ignored it, assuming
it came from some stress that we didn’t know about. That it was just our
imagination.
Still her memory dwindled. Every Sunday we
drove to their house in Stow, Ohio. My mom and I would listen to her teach us
about how the Writer’s Cup for Golf was really a reunion of international
writers. We would watch her read underlined passages from her favorite books
like Rebecca or The President’s Wife, or her magazine about Ireland. We would watch
her struggle over words or phrases. We would see her constantly washing the
dishes, stuffing buckeyes into her pockets, or hide pens in her favorite drawer.
We heard her forget my cousins’ names. We saw her not recognize me, my mom, or
my dad.
Sometimes she would merely confuse my
mom and me for each other. Often we became relatives that she knew growing up
in Plymouth, Ohio. She would share how her mother was doing, or how she had run
that day and hid in the fields to read a book. We were her college friends,
hearing the new gossip from a night of bridge. Or about her new beau, Ken, and
how she did not know what to think of him, an engineer, her brother’s friend,
just so tall with the Scandinavian
blonde hair and blue eyes. We were her concerned friends in Akron,
visiting her after the delivery of her fourth child Christopher while her
husband was in Africa for work. She would laugh as she related her fear in the
hospital or the expressions that she received from the nurses as a woman
without her husband, giving birth to a child. We were her colleagues in BPW,
Business and Professional Women, and she would recount how her English students
were doing at Stow High School. We were the nurses or some friendly strangers,
and she would lie about how her husband was not taking care of her. She
bemoaned about how she needed to leave this place, how he didn’t understand
her.
Good days would follow bad ones. Some
days she would correct the grammar of an article. Or she would write in the
margins of a book, “Good job! That was a great point.” Or she would sit down
next to me, pull out her yarn and begin teaching me a stitch. Those days, she
recognized who I was. She would ask about Jessica in Africa. She would turn to
my Dad,
“Chris, what is happening? What was
your father saying?”
It was those days that made the bad
ones seem like nothing. To catch a glimpse of Grandma, the way she had been,
made us laugh at her mistakes on the bad days. They made us forget about her
dementia. They convinced Granddad that she was not losing her memory, that she
could get better.
As those four years progressed
however, the bad days outnumbered the good ones. She would frequently stumble on
passages, angrily closing the book half way through reading. She would come
downstairs, wearing capris in the winter or Halloween clothing during December.
She would cry more often and complain about Granddad more. It was hard to not
ignore this decline; yet, Granddad desperately did. He hung onto anything that
he believed would bring back his beautiful bean chéile.
He had set up a St. Patrick’s day
dinner my senior year of high school for that exact purpose. For years Grandma
had celebrated St. Patty’s day with a huge family dinner; she normally made the
traditional corned beef, cabbage and soda bread. She always wanted to remind us
of our Irish heritage, something that Granddad desperately desired to prompt
Grandma to now remember. So my mom followed the family recipe for the food; we
set the table and decorated the house with green shamrocks. We dressed Grandma
in green and white with her favorite Celtic cross. We gathered around the table
and after prayer, began eating. Everything seemed normal; everyone was
cheerful. Grandma was complacently there, quietly eating the food that my dad
spooned onto her plate.
Soon, however, she became upset as her
hearing aid squealed. She winced in pain and cried out. My dad and Granddad
tried to console her but to no avail. Dinner was interrupted. My mom and I led
Grandma to the next room, hoping that new surroundings would distract her from her
present distraught. Somehow, eventually, she did calm down, but we did not
continue dinner. We left that night, realizing that she would have to move into
a nursing home.
Granddad, however, did not agree. It
wasn’t until she fell and ended up in the hospital that he was forced to comply.
I was a freshman in college when my parents told me the news. That winter break
as the heavy snow flakes fell onto the windshield, we made our jaunt to
Briarwood Nursing Home. They warned me what to expect, but I will never forget
the stale stench of dry urine that infiltrated the nose as stagnate air stifled
the body. The insistent beeping of the door that sounded, complementing the
ever present wailing and screaming. The bright fluorescent lights. The twenty
elderly patients in wheelchairs, all lined up in a row with their backs against
the white-washed wall and in front of the hospital-like reception desk. How their
white balding heads sagged, leaning against their shoulders. How some eyes were shut and mouths open as
they snoozed; how others stared straight ahead, their eyes glazed over. How at the
end of the wheelchairs, Grandma joined them.
As my parents nonchalantly discussed the
week with Granddad, I kept fidgeting, crossing my legs and uncrossing them that
day. The coach seemed rigid and uncomfortable; its red upholstery looked old
and torn against the putrid pink wall. Across from us, Grandma continued to
gaze downward, isolated from the outside world. She seemed inhumane, lifeless,
too drugged to even move due to her list of medications. Meanwhile, the nurses
would stop and chat to one another. They did not inquire after her or even
greet Granddad, who came every day. They were too busy to care. It was the
modern version of an insane asylum, except rather than electroshock therapy,
they had resorted to medication. That day I left angry and frustrated,
determined to not journey back to that nursing home every again. Back at
school, I tried desperately to forget the horrid conditions in which my grandma
was living.
Spring Break, I found myself staring out
the ugly nursing home windows onto the garden’s bare frozen ground. I was
pushing Grandma’s wheelchair around the circular hallway so my parents could
peacefully converse with Granddad. Her head drooped onto her shoulder as we rolled
past the peaceful and happy pictures of pasture land and hills. Nonchalantly I chatted about college, my
biology classes, my boyfriend, anything that I thought she would have liked to
know about in the past. Rather, she placed her feet down on the floor.
“Grandma?” I knelt down to face her. “We
need to keep going.”
For minutes she ignored me, and we stood
there in the middle of the hallway. Patients obliviously passed. It was not
until my dad came around to check on us that we began to move again. Unsure how
to really react, I settled Grandma next to Granddad and took my place in the
middle of my parents. The rest of the visit continued in that awkward fashion.
I left feeling a sense of freedom. Fresh
air. The cold froze my senses, numbing my emotions and pain. As my parents and
I walked toward the car, the snow/rain mix fell to the ground, washing the
hideous building. It attempted to hide the grotesque truth behind a blank
slate, the clean beginning. It allowed us to forget the reality of the
situation. It acted like a new tradition
from an old foundation: an insane asylum for the elderly. It took care of Grandma,
because we could not.
Yet it could not hide that history
forever. That Spring, Grandma contracted a series of illnesses, including
pneumonia. In the hospital room beside Granddad, I watched her small frail body
that disappeared behind the white sheets live through oxygen tanks, feeding IVs
and who knows what else. Her combed
white hair fell against the pillow and her shoulder, and her eyes peacefully
remained shut. About two months later on June 5, 2011, she passed away.
Whenever I meet anyone that knew my
grandma, they gently pass their condolences and reassure me that she is in a
better place. They sympathize with the family, understand how awful her
conditions were, and how she is not suffering anymore. For months, my parents
convinced me that I needed to accept the conditions – the nursing home and
hospital – that she had lived in, accept her death, and accept her disease.
Acceptance is hard, though. For a while, the only way to accept that was to
picture her before the disease. To
remember her before dementia engulfed her, and she lost her memory.
If I do not remember her during the
disease, is it possible to properly mourn her death? Yet if I depict her during
dementia, is that properly remembering her life?
On June 12, 2011 – what would have been her 82nd
birthday – a wake was held in honor of her. The next day the coffin lay under a
white tent, above the lush green grass and beside the huge dark hole. The sun
in the beautiful blue sky with fluffy white clouds baked down on us as we in
black made our way toward it. As I touched the dark brown box, I remembered her
brown eyes, her brightening smile and her beautiful white hair.
I remember her that September day in high
school and Easter in the hospital. I remember her as the intelligent, constant
teacher; I remember her as the declining child-like patient. I remember her as
the person that encouraged Jessica and me to read, love our heritage and history.
I remember her teaching me to crochet. I remember her forgetting what to say. I
remember her not knowing who I am. I remember her as someone whom I loved.
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