crone

my grandmother has forgotten how to eat. I guess this is the expected progression of dementia. Soon, they say, her brain will unlearn how to swallow and that, they say, will be that.
Thinking about her tipping out of her wheel chair, or lashing out at her roommates; watching her say a series of unrelated words with the expectant look of someone who's just asked you a question they can't wait to hear the answer to, awakens the same primal impulse that propels me headlong down the stairs, instantly alert, when little S cries out in the night. I want to fold her in my arms and rock her into one last sleep just like the infant she's become.

Our relationship has always been incredibly basic on the surface, and complex in my head. My first fumbling attempt at a short story (during the Flannery O'Connor obsession) was begun on the way home from visiting her in the late autumn after my Grandpa died, when my mom, my sisters and I traveled to her house in rural west michigan to put up the storm windows, rake the leaves and winterize the car. I recalled our most memorable interactions; the good ones where we made stuff together, and the other ones where she criticized and questioned anything I did that wasn't the way she had always done. The relentless, insistent offering of turkey every at every holiday meal in seven vegetarian years. "But it's delicious! Your mother cooked it perfectly! Not dry at all!" When my Grandmother would go home after staying with us for the weekend, I heard the resigned and rueful tone in my own mother's voice as she told us how Gram had pleaded with her as a kid, when my great grandmother would leave from a visit, "If I ever start to act like that, you have to set me straight." Of course, my mother never did. Despite our assurances to her that she was "in a different universe" than Gram, and that we'd never let her become so out of touch, she'd just smile and shake her head. Even at 14, I could tell that, even more than she wanted us to say those things, she wanted to believe that they were true.

Observing Gram's steep decline, I am unsettled by the rush of warmth I feel toward this woman I know I have only poorly understood. I wish that I had tried harder to see her for who she really is. Instead, I was so afraid that I would find my self suddenly at 60, unable or unwilling to do anything beyond decorate a parlor or comment authoritatively on the proper preparation of Salisbury steak that I couldn't - or wouldn't. Over the years since my Grandpa's death, stubbornness and a little bit of a disconnect have gradually given way to confusion and the relentless, painful, regression of dementia . And now she's forgotten how to eat.

So, why have I been such a lousy/ conflicted granddaughter? Why have I always been so afraid of being close to my own Grandmother? What's happening now? Do I finally feel a sense of compassion and the ability to really love her because the archetype has lost it's power as her autonomy is eroded by disease? Have I seen my self and my own mother grow and change enough as adults to finally believe that a worldview isn't necessarily hereditary, and we aren't fated irrevocably to become our parents? Am I finally able let go of my angsty, self-obsessed, figuring-out-who-I-want-to-be, long enough to just be, and just care for this woman as she is, at the end of her life?

I know that I should, and will, look back to the many lovely moments; surround her in my mind with the sun filtering through the trees onto her clothesline, the dusty smell of her mysterious stone basement, the perfect, perfect starched white curtains shifting in the breeze through the window of the little attic room where she sewed and I spent overnights. I suppose I could try to write another dumb short story. Probably I'll just drive out to be with her before it gets too cold.