grandparents

She walked to the bank on the last Friday of every month to deposit her social security check. She’d been doing it on her own for a long time, since her husband of 49 years died of a brain tumor ten years back. She folded the check in half then put it in her wallet, in the zippered part, then clicked her wallet shut and put it in her pocketbook. After securing the purse strap on her shoulder, Grandma put her navy peacoat on, over her handbag to hide it, and left her one-bedroom apartment on Hobart Street in the heart of L.A.

Every so often if I was in town, I’d join Grandma on her monthly walk. We were never particularly close. She’d always been contentious, but she once had a quick wit and delivered it with sharp humor, both of which left her years ago, as did the radiant beauty she once possessed. Conversations were now limited to her endless list of complaints — physical, familial, and social. Visiting was always a chore, but she was all the extended family either of us had. And family is family.

Her bank was on the corner of Wilshire and Vermont, a particularly noisy, crowded intersection of two major thoroughfares, but Grandma was used to the hustle and bustle. She was a city girl — from Manhattan first, lived above a candy/soda fountain shop she ran with her husband. She and my granddad followed their daughter to California and rented the flat on Hobart Street, locally known as the Miracle Mile District. She’d lived there for the last 45 years, took no vacations, and never traveled beyond the L.A. area since arriving.

We walked down her quiet street of whitewashed art deco apartments at a hurried pace with purpose. And she was fast, especially for an 87-year-old woman who stood a mere 4 feet 9 inches tall. It was generally difficult to keep up with her. But on this particular Friday when we turned off her quiet corner onto Wilshire Blvd., Grandma startled, and stopped, clearly confused.

I practically ran into her. My intrusion into her space brought her back to the present. She scolded me for not paying attention and we were on our way again. Her pace was slower now, more cautious, and I knew something was wrong but couldn’t figure out what. I suggested we go back to her place to get my car and I’d drive her to the bank. By the tone of her refusal, it was clear she didn’t care for my implication she was unable to manage on her own.

She picked up her pace so I hurried alongside her in silence the rest of the way to the bank. Grandma opened the glass door, took a few steps inside and stopped dead. I stood panting beside her as she stared around the large, brightly lit space — at the tellers behind the long counter, and the desks of the managers and sales reps across the way. She took on this horrified expression, brought her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a scream, and her eyes filled with tears that slid down her face when she blinked.

I was taken aback. I’d never seen my grandmother cry, not even at her husband’s funeral. She was a hard woman.

“I have no idea where I am, or why I’m here,” she whispered, clearly shamed. “I know I’m losing my mind. I can feel it but I can’t stop it.” Then she looked away, out the wall of windows at the crowded intersection beyond.

My mom/her daughter had been telling me for months that Grandma was losing it. Her normally sharp tongue was telling tales of things that never happened, my mom warned. She was hospitalized twice for taking too much medication because she’d forgotten she’d taken it earlier. Lacking the space and knowledge to care for her mother through end-of-life, my mom still struggled with the notion of putting her mother in an elder care facility.

Grandma stood in the middle of the bank crying, and I stood there gaping without a clue what to do. People started staring so I took her by the arm and led her to a chair by an empty desk. I knelt in front of her, held her hands in mine, and told her to look at me. She did. Her gray eyes focused on me, and I saw the fear of old age in them. I spoke softly — told her where we were and why, and that we’d walked to the bank together.

Recognition filled her face, but her gloom remained. She retrieved a Kleenex from the small travel pack she kept in her purse, dabbed her face, and wiped her nose. She needed a minute before going to a teller window and depositing her check. For the life of her, she couldn’t remember how to do the math required for the cashback she needed.

“I’m going crazy. I just know it.” She looked at me, and I felt her begging me for salvation.

I gave her my pocket calculator, and while I taught her how to work it, I reassured her she no longer needed simple math skills. We filled out her deposit slip together and then checked the math with the machine at the teller window. Grandma slipped her $50 into the zippered part of her wallet then put it in her pocketbook and we were on our way.

Though I wanted to, I thought better of suggesting she stay at the bank and I go get my car. She seemed back to her old self, hustling along Wilshire Blvd. I paced her in silence back to her flat. Inside her own environment, she seemed at ease. We watched her favorite soap opera and then she made us scrambled eggs with onions for a late lunch. I helped her with the dishes and left, making light of her dementia with senior moment jokes of how we all forget stuff, and feeling confident Grandma was going to be just fine.

I did not accompany her to the bank on the Friday a month later. When she got to the teller window and realized she’d lost the calculator I gave her, she panicked and became disoriented again. The teller was kind enough to call my mom, who came from the Valley to pick her up and drive her the half mile home. That afternoon, an hour or two after my mom left her, Grandma took three doses of Valium in less than an hour and ended up in the hospital getting her stomach pumped from the overdose.

Not too long after that my mother got a court order for legal custody of her mother. At first, when my grandmother was still lucid, she resented the hell out of her daughter’s authority, and the Home she was forced to reside in. When I’d pick her up for family functions, she’d spend the entire ride slamming my mom. But within a few months, her anger gave way to wonder as dementia took hold. Memories of her limited life experience were replaced by complex fantasies of exotic places she’d traveled, gala events she never attended, and interactions with famous people she’d never met.

Less than a year after the second bank incident my grandmother did not recognize her family, did not know me, or her own daughter, and claimed she’d never had a child. Though my mother continued to visit her weekly for the next two years, Grandma never acknowledged she had a daughter. Pretending to be a visiting friend instead of her child took its toll on my mom, but my grandmother was none the wiser. She enjoyed the visits. Over just a few months she seemed lighter, brighter than she’d ever been. She seemed happier since crossing the line of reality all the way. Her flat gray eyes filled with excitement when she told of her fantastical adventures on Safari in the jungles of Africa, or the time she did the Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary.

Her fantasies shielded her from harsh realities present and looming. At 89, her body and mind were shutting down, her time running out. She was on the fringe of life now, and almost invisible. Surely she felt it too. Perhaps so many old people lose their mind because the reality of their marginal existence is just too heavy to bear. Dementia was her reprieve. Insanity served her. But getting there — watching herself lose her own mind must have been hellish.

A few years after grandma passed, my mom died of cancer. She never lost her mind, was sentient to the bitter end. But my father is 84, and his sharp mind is clearly going. He repeats the same sentence several times. He slurs words, jumbles them, can’t find the right ones. He is on scores of medications for his heart, blood pressure, liver, and other vital organs shutting down with age. Once an articulate pontificator, my dad talks mostly of his many ailments now. He tries to assure me he’s ‘accepted his lot,’ living in a private apartment in Building One of the retirement Home he recently moved to in Washington, far from the California sunshine he loved, but nice, and affordable.

On the phone with him last Saturday, I heard the fear, the raw terror in his voice as he spoke of the terminal patients in Building Three of the Home. I sought words of wisdom to lighten his load but could think of none. My heart ached for him, missing him while he is still here. I wanted to save him, but know I can not. As I hung up the phone, as harsh as it seems, even to me, I wished for my father a speedy journey into a pleasant dementia.

My sister is dead, I told the bank manager.

She isn’t dead. She lives in Washington with her husband, having recently moved from L.A., where we were both born and raised.

The bank manager expressed his condolences. He accepted the paperwork from our lawyer to remove my sister’s name from our Trust as the potential guardian of our children should my husband and I die before they’re of legal age to care for themselves.

I told him she was dead to delete her from my psyche, distance myself from loving her. Five years ago, she told my husband she didn’t want any contact with him, me, or our kids, her then 7 and 9 yr old niece and nephew, in a response to an email my husband sent her.

Much to my sister’s chagrin, we’ve raised our kids without religion. Cleaning out her Agoura Hills McMansion before moving to her custom built estate in Washington, she sent our kids Hanukkah ‘gifts’ of broken toys that used to belong to her children. She missed acknowledging our daughter’s birthday, again. Three months later, she sent her a present with the one she sent for our son’s birthday, and spelled her name wrong on the card. She’d disappointed our kids time and again, ignoring their birthdays and special events, rarely calling, and talking about her life, not theirs, when she did. Many times after jacking them up that she was coming to visit, on the day she was supposed to arrive, she left it to me to tell our kids she wasn’t coming.

Her sins were many, and mounted with the years without apology. My husband got tired of her hurting our kids, emailed her five sentences politely informing her the correct spelling of our daughter’s name, and requested if she was going to send them birthday cards or gifts to please do so on or around their respective birthdays.

My sister decided he was asking too much and emailed back that “though I am deeply in love with your kids, and it breaks my heart to do so,” she was withdrawing from their lives entirely. She stopped calling every few months. For a couple of years she sent the kids birthday cards when it struck her fancy—weeks late to our daughter, if at all, but managed to get cards to our son within days of his, professing her deep affection and love for him. It took all my will not to shed the cards in a million tiny pieces. Her sentiments to him were totally self-serving, for her ego, her ‘loving’ words meaningless, meant to pump up her self-image alone.

“Love is an ACTION, what we do, not some abstract in our heads,” my husband and I teach our kids. “Don’t profess love in words without taking actions to show it,” we preach. “And don’t accept words of love as truth without seeing the actions that actualize their sentiment.”

Over the years my sister had been so disrespectful to our youngest that our daughter never really formed a bond, but her choice to terminate her relationship with our kids deeply hurt our son. She was important to him because the few extended family members we have left, namely my brother and father, didn’t call or acknowledge our children in any way.

My mom died when our daughter was just 2, and our son only 4 yrs old, so she never really got to know our kids. She did love them though. Deeply. Profoundly. And they got that. How did they know?

She came to visit often.
She called them on the phone every couple of days.
She mailed them presents on time, and called to sing Happy Birthday on their special days.
She spelled their names right.
She stayed abreast of their lives through me, my husband, and through the kids, consistently showed interest in their interests and feelings, and shared her world with them.

My mother often extolled how much she loved our kids, to me, to them, to anyone who’d listen, but she also showed it, so my children knew it was real.

The day my dad called to tell me of my mom’s cancer diagnosis, after I hung up the phone I said to my husband, “Well, that’s the end of my family.” She was the conduit that kept us together, in contact, a feature in each other’s lives. She fervently believed people come and go, but family is forever, the folks with which your love and loyalty should reside. Within a year of my mother’s passing, my sister and father checked out of my life, and the lives of our kids, too busy with their own to bother with me or mine.

My father, like my sister, practices love in the abstract. He never talks to his grandkids, never calls [even me], never asks to talk to them when I call him, and rarely even asks about them. He doesn’t acknowledge their birthdays anymore. I got tired of reminding him with multiple calls and emails weekly the month before their special days, then daily reminders the week before. The rare occasions I call my dad, he always professes how much he loves my kids, how important they are to him, though he does nothing to actually show them this. He never did, I just didn’t notice, as my mother’s effusive love overshadowed his self-love. When I mention his grandkids, he reminds me to tell them that grandpa loves them, and misses them. But I don’t. I tell them, “Popi says hi.” I don’t want our children to ever get the impression it’s acceptable to say you love someone when you take virtually no action to show it.

Her body ravaged by cancer and near death, my mother insisted my father take her to Toys R Us. She bought each of our kids their next birthday gift, and made him swear to mail them on time. She was hoping to establish a tradition (an action) for my father to adopt for his grandchildren after she was gone. He delivered her dying gifts to our kids two years later, on his way to visit my sister in Washington.

In a thousand lifetimes I cannot repay my mom for her precious gift of LOVE I now model to our children. But I cannot buy into her belief [and society’s rhetoric] that family and love are synonymous anymore.

LOVE, like potential, is meaningless unless put into ACTION.

Tag: grandparents

The Upside of Dementia

LOVE Defined