After Christmas, I see my dad and he asks how my mother’s mother is. I tell him.
“That’s too bad,” he replies. “Such a sweet lady.”
This doesn’t seem quite right to me as a descriptor, and especially not as a descriptor of what we’re losing as her mind goes. Far too reductive. But then, even I am probably too reductive when I try to elaborate on my grandmother’s character. I find myself attributing all her faults to the the time and place that raised her and all her virtues to herself alone—the faults (casual sexism, casual xenophobia, immunity to art) being commonplace while the virtues seem to me so original.
I’ve written about her unshakeable self-possession, her bracing irreligion. There is also her sense of humor, unsurpassed by anyone I’ve known. I’m not sure if she’s ever told a joke. It’s all in the shared glance at the apt time, the extreme understatement or jolt of unexpected bluntness, a humor dry and deep-rooted as an oak in its marcescence.
There is also her generosity. What didn’t she do for her grandchildren? She fed us, taught us all the birds and and trees and wildflowers, drove us to all our childhood engagements, housed us and took over our care completely when necessary, sewed elaborate toys and Halloween costumes, talked to us as one intelligent human to another from the earliest age possible, adapted to my vegetarianism and then veganism without complaint (to the extent of constructing from scratch one year a massive vegan “turkey” roast long before meat substitutes were commonplace), saw us through our frustrations with other family members, wrote letters when we were away, made up shortfalls in my college tuition. Did all of this quietly and unstintingly. Sweet? Not like syrup. But maybe like the sap inside the maple.
She was a parent to me with none of the usual baggage or difficulty. This is surely in part because she was not literally my parent. But I believe many of us felt this way: when my grandmother was still wholly herself, there was no one easier to be around. No one you wanted to please more. No one easier to please if you were one of hers.
That is probably, in the end, what it comes down to. When I try to explain my grandmother to other people or myself, I go off spinning arguments for her unique superiority, when it might be more accurate to say just this: we belonged to each other.
I’ve drifted into the past tense. I keep finding myself there lately when I talk about her—then halting, squinting at the scene like I’ve gotten off at the wrong bus stop. She is not gone. But so many of the things that defined her and our relationship have truly vanished.
Her mind resets itself from moment to moment, and the moments are not long. Some of them do seem illuminated by a flicker of what she was. She’s there in a look, a laugh, a few words strung together that fit the scene, as if her old mind were briefly returning to haunt her new frail body with its new smell. (As a child visiting great-relatives in nursing homes I assumed this smell was some sort of institutional lack of cleanliness; now it occurs to me that it is the chemical signature of the brain breaking down and taking the body with it.) But these visitations grow briefer and farther apart.
At Christmas, I find that all of us are dealing with this differently. In the remoteness of dementia my grandmother is like a celebrity and we her abject, anonymous fans, overflowing with love she cannot use. This makes us diversely awkward. Some address her with the loud, large words and gestures some people deploy toward strangers’ children. Some reach for humor, but the jokes slip past her and thud against the walls. Some trace wide paths around her chair in the sunshine beside the electric fireplace.
I park myself beside this chair. When others come by, I draw them into a loose circle, theorizing that she might like to feel the warmth of talk around her even if it has no meaning.
Sometimes I sit beside her on the rug, as if she might tell me a story. Mostly we’re quiet. As the silence expands, the entire endeavor of human conversation begins to seem weird and wrong to me. How come so much of it rests upon a shared understanding of the past, a stable sense of identity? Shouldn’t there be other nice things to talk about?
If there are, I can’t find them. It’s still nice to be beside her, and silence has always been easy for us anyway. The few sentences my grandmother produces spontaneously now seem to bubble up from a desolate otherworld.
“I never did much sewing,” she muses mournfully at one point, as if it were a great regret of her life. I say that I don’t think that’s true, that she sewed us beautiful things. I can’t tell if this news holds any comfort.
Later, she holds up her hand, showing me something, but what: the thinness of her finger, which her wedding band now wobbles around? No, it seems to be the ring itself she wants to show; she fiddles with it.
“It’s about all I have,” she claims. I take her hand.
“Should we go see what’s taking them so long with dinner?” I say, and guide her to the kitchen to recall the family she has made.