My 89-year-old grandmother is a time traveler now. She wakes up one day and thinks she’s living in her aunt’s old house in Jamestown, getting the top floor of the farmhouse fixed up as an apartment to rent. Another day, she’s in my grandparents’ first house in Cleveland, or in Everett, Washington with her Aunt Jenny, or at her sister Mary’s bedside in Redding, California. She regales people with tales about her “recent” cross-country train trip (the one she made shortly after the war ended, right before she married my grandfather) and her cruise to Alaska (in the 1980s).
My aunt reports that Grandma is usually content, even happy, at the assisted living home where she now lives. She flits from room to room visiting fellow residents, who are also living in their own times and worlds. She does recognize most of her family members when they visit. Sometimes their presence throws her off and seems to cause some distress, because she knows they are important but cannot always remember much about them. At other times, she remembers almost everything and can carry on conversations about the present. But she never stays in the present for long.
I think about her disease and her life in the facility, where she lives with other people suffering from dementia. It is sad that she has come to be there, because, as my husband says, her world has gotten very small. It’s not really her home; even if she comes to think of it that way, I am not sure I can. And yet in some ways, her world is also larger than it has been in years; memories are scattered all around her, but when one takes hold of her, it is so close now, so immediate. She is probably thinking of and remembering people, places, and events that haven’t crossed her mind in years. The basic fact of linear time — linear experience following experience — doesn’t hold true for her any longer.
I don’t mean to gloss over or underestimate the difficulties of the disease she has, for her or for my family watching it progress. I don’t mean to make it sound easy, or whimsical, or more fascinating than it is sad. Still, I can see why it’s harder on my mother and my aunt than it is on my grandmother herself. She can’t lay her hands on all the memories she has accumulated over the course of her life, and she will continue to lose some of them. But for now, according to all reports, she is content with the ones she is still able to call to mind. Perhaps that’s because most of them seem to be good ones. Grandma has had a long life, and not an easy one at all, but somehow the worst times, the hardest times, are not the times she finds herself dwelling in now.
In a way, she is not just having “forgetful spells”; she is having remembering spells. One moment, my mother says, she sits quietly, as if she doesn’t know where she is or what will come to her. The next moment, she finds herself with a person, a place, a memory, that she hasn’t beheld in years. She doesn’t have to try hard or wrack her brain in frustration to recall it, even if it was long-forgotten. The memory just comes to her easily, like an old friend. She greets it, talks of it to whoever happens to be with her, grasps it tight for a moment, or an hour, or a day, and then, just as easily, lets it go.
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I wish I could have seen Grandma and spent more time her these past several years. My childhood would have been pretty grim, at times, without her influence. We did so many things together, but without that very conscious, striving, nostalgic, or coddling sort of attitude that marks the approach of so many parents and grandparents to their children and grandchildren. Grandma didn’t do these things with me because she was trying to be SuperGrandma, or impart any great wisdom to the younger generation, or forever enshrine precious memories in my impressionable young mind. I think anyone who has, as she had, five children, would not necessarily have the time or the inclination to view time spent with her grandchild in such an ambitious, particularly deliberate way. No, she just took me places and did things with me because she wanted to do them herself, and thought since I was with her so often, maybe I’d better come along and do them, too. Some of the things, after all, might prove useful to me; some might not; either way, I’d be taken care of and well fed while we got on with things.
She would often watch me after school while my parents were at work, and I loved those afternoons with her. She taught me how to plant a vegetable garden, weed flower beds, can green beans and peaches, make kolache, figure out whodunit on Murder, She Wrote. Thanks to her, I can read a tide book, bait a hook, and (theoretically) sweet-talk my way out of a ticket from Fish & Wildlife if, say, my nonexistent fishing license ever expires, or I ever happen to find myself fishing in a part of the river marked for “conservation only,” or I maybe, just maybe catch over my limit of rainbow trout.
She made me take a long bath every night that I stayed at her house, which I hated, but the task was somewhat redeemed when I would emerge to stand on her fuzzy dark green bath mat and cover myself in Johnson’s baby powder till my skin was almost as pale as hers. She held my hand and prayed over every crop of green beans we ever planted, though she was the opposite of religious, and every year we ended up with an enormous green bean harvest — so many beans we couldn’t give them all away. She collected so many things (kites, music boxes, and classic musicals on film were my favorites), and had cabinets filled with beautiful crystal wine glasses and porcelain teacups that she never forbade me from holding and using simply because I was young. She taught me how to play two-, three-, and four-handed pinochle when we were stuck inside on rainy days. When I was a kid, she got all the good channels (all 24 of them!), and she pretended not to hear when I jumped on her guest bed. She once offered to supply me with condoms, which of course embarrassed me to no end, and would have even if I’d had some use for them at the time; but I now look back on it as a very generous, very crazy, very Grandma sort of offer.
She was the only one who really took me on vacations when I was little — mostly to the Oregon coast, where we slept in my grandparents’ RV, rode around on garage-sale vintage bicycles, dug for clams on muddy banks, and caught crabs in pots in the choppy waters of the bay or off the quieter docks at the marina. Once we were walking on the beach together at sunset and saw two teenaged boys chest-deep in the Pacific waves, fishing crabs right out of the crashing high-tide surf. “If they can do it, we can do it, Nicole,” Grandma declared, “let’s just give it a try”; and even though I was scared at first, she grabbed my hand and hauled me into the waves up to my waist, then up to my chest; and I never thought it would work, I thought I would freeze or be swept under first, but the woman was indefatigable and soon we had a plastic grocery sack (where had we gotten it? had we asked the boys to give us one of theirs?) filled with regulation-size Dungeness crabs that we had plucked right out of the ocean.
As we walked back up the beach, shivering and fighting the undertow, she pointed up at the sky and told me, “I knew it would work. You have to know about the phases of the moon, you see? The tides were on our side tonight.”
Beautiful post, N. Thanks.
Thanks, V.