Current mood:

melancholy

grandpa, 2008.
"I haven't seen you in a long time," he says when I first walk over and sit on the couch opposite him, and I wonder what his concept of 'a long time' is these days. A week, a month, a year, five years? Does it even matter at this point?

"A year," I say, smiling politely and nodding. "It's been a year."

"A year," he repeats, and I know he doesn't remember. He doesn't know that my sister and I were here during Memorial Day 2007, that we visited every day of that trip, or that he asked us no less than four times each visit if we had men in our lives yet: "You girls got boyfriends yet? You do? You don't? Pretty girls like you need boyfriends." It's been a year, chronologically speaking, but for all he knows, he hasn't seen me in a decade.

"You're all grown up," he says, and I get the feeling that he knows we're related, maybe even that I'm his grandchild, but he doesn't know who I am or who my parents are. And I would be correct, because as Dad tells me later, he asked my mother -- while I was there -- if she had any children.

"I am," I say, and he says nothing else. Just studies me quietly.

I'm grateful, and feel guilty for it, when my parents, aunt, & uncle come back into the room and distract him. Everyone sits down, taking up all the seats, and he turns to my grandma. "We got a full room of people here," he says. "That couch is full."

"We do," she says.

He's 87, which is an age long past the point where tact is attempted or even encouraged. He tells my aunt and uncle, in separate conversations, that they're getting fat. He responds "HUH?" to every question asked because he won't go get a replacement hearing aid. He makes disdainful comments about every golfer we watch on TV, saying, "That man wouldn't last a day in the coal mines." Everyone agrees.

Everyone makes small talk. Grandma's tire is low, so Uncle Ronnie offers to take it to get air in the morning. She asks about my flight. Mom and Dad talk about their trip to Alaska. My aunt Cathy, mom's oldest sister, examine some of Grandma's medication, concerned about the side effects.

During a lull in the conversation, Grandpa taps his cane on the floor. "We got a lot of people here," he says again. "The couch has four people on it."

"Yes," my grandma says again, short and clipped. He's taxing on her. We can tell.

When we leave the first night, we all say goodnight, and he doesn't get up from his chair, instead waving a half-hearted goodbye as we walk out the door.






On Father's Day, we come back for a potluck dinner. In addition to my parents, Cathy, and Ron, my mother's brother Carl and his wife (also named Kathy, but for simplicity's sake, everyone calls her Susie). I bring a pie. Mom has green beans. Sue makes the salad. Grandma has the ham and au gratin potatoes waiting for us. Cathy carries in a Father's Day cake from the grocery.

Dinner is good, and Grandpa jokes with Mom that he always gets two desserts every night -- or, at least, whenever he demands it. Other than the occasional comment, he's quiet, unlike last year, when he perked up and regaled my sister and me with stories of getting drunk in his youth. But as I tell her later, he is likely just confused -- with so many people in the house, he has trouble keeping up with the conversation.

Grandma asks when I'm leaving, and I tell her, "Dad and I are flying out tomorrow."

"What?" Grandpa asks. "When are you leaving?"

"Tomorrow. Dad and I leave tomorrow."

"Who?"

"Dad. Me and Dad."

"Who?"

He doesn't understand, more proof that he's not entirely sure who I am. "Byrd," I finally say, pointing to Dad. This, he understands. Later, when we all retire to the living room post-dinner, he will comment on the full house yet again. He opens his Father's Day gifts, including a musical card from Cathy, which plays "Hail to the Chief" every time it's opened. He opens it over. And over. And over. He plays with their housecat, named "Misty" (as all their cats have been named for some years now), and I wonder if he knows that she's not the same Misty he had last year, or even the same one he had seven or eight years ago.

When we leave, the adults scatter to the kitchen to collect their dishes. I walk up to Grandpa and ask, "Can I get a hug?"

"You sure can," he says, and leans forward in his chair. "You'll even get a kiss, too." He gives kisses to all the female grandchildren. Maybe he knows who I am, after all. He smacks me loudly on the cheek.

"It was good to see you," I say.

He nods, smiling, his face wrinkled and tired. Then, he asks it, the question I'd been waiting for. "You got a boyfriend yet?"

I'd practiced my answer. "No, not right now, Grandpa," I say, hoping he doesn't lecture me, as he did my sister last year when she confessed she was single.

"Not right now?" he asks. I shake my head. He nods sagely. "Well, better wait and find one that you like." As I straighten my skirt and get ready to find my parents, he asks, "How old are you?"

"Twenty-six," I say.

"Twenty-six? You're getting old," he says. "You're not a little girl anymore."

"No," I say. "No, I'm not."

He holds his cane in one hand, smiling again. "Well," he says, "You sure are pretty." And for some reason, I want to cry.




Alzheimer's is a cruel, cruel disease. It seems too horrible to be real sometimes, like it's some bizarre disorder from a sci-fi book. A long, drawn-out sickness that steals your memories from the present back, that eliminates your personality and identity and and independence and leaves you in a fog? People always says they want to live forever, or at least as long as possible, but sometimes I wonder if it's not more humane to everyone involved to go earlier and more quickly. I watch my grandfather waste away into a shell of his former self, and I see the way he's dragging my once-spritely grandmother down with him, and I don't know what anyone can do at this point. They live in a retirement facility, surrounded by all the care their money can provide, but their wealth can't buy back his memories.

Unlike her siblings, my mother at least knows what to expect: she watched my paternal grandmother succumb to Alzheimer's years ago, when I was just a child (I barely remember her). She was there when someone in Salt Lick called for my father, telling him that Grandma Hazel was wandering around downtown, asking everyone in sight where her husband -- who had been dead for forty-plus years -- had gone to. She knows he likely will forget how to use the bathroom, how to feed himself, how to form even simple words. It doesn't make the experience any easier, but my hyperemotional mother, drama queen extraordinaire, seems to have accepted his fate and adjusted more readily than her brother and sisters.

But as for me, now dealing with the horrible reality of my first up-close-and-personal experience with Alzheimer's, I can't stop myself from wondering just how the odds are stacked for a set of sisters who've directly descended from victims on both sides of the family.