Sophomore Discusses Her Grandmother’s Alzheimers

She can’t remember the times she came over at 6 a.m. on Christmas to watch my siblings and I anxiously tear open gifts, or the recipe for her family famous Sticky Chocolate Fudge. She can’t remember how she taught me how to dive off the diving board and how to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the piano. She’s forgotten the way she used to watch the birds peck at the food from her beloved birdhouses, and the feel of the earth that she dug in her hands in her overgrown garden. She doesn’t remember how to clasp her silver cross necklace, or how to put food in her mouth.
My grandma doesn’t remember my name.

* * *
A thief is sneaky, sly and smooth. The only way you can tell if a good thief was present is by what the thief leaves in its wake. Sometimes it’s sharp shards of glass scattered on the after a window is broken during a robbery. Sometimes it’s a clear, empty butterfly stand where round Gucci glasses once rested. But the best thief I’ve ever known of left a blank, glassy look where my grandmother’s blue eyes used to shine.

This thief–the best one–is Alzheimer’s disease.

It sneaks into people’s minds, and steals pieces of a memory. Slowly, one memory at a time, until there’s nothing left to be stolen. It is relentless.

My mom noticed something was wrong with my grandma in 2003, when she became spacier than usual. My grandma had a hair appointment with the hairdresser she’d been to for 15 years, but on her way to the salon her mind went blank and she had no idea where she was going. She ended up at my house, and the minute she told my mom what happened my mom knew something was wrong. Things like this kept happening, and in 2005 she was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

As time went on and her illness progressed, she became meaner and oddly competitive. She’d do weird things like go outside and steal the basketball from my little brother when he was practicing his dribbling. I think something in her mind made her want to prove to herself that she wasn’t losing her mind, and prove to everyone around her that she was still a capable person.

Then, in 2007, my grandfather died from cancer.

They had spent fifty years of their life together, and while he was sick and weakened from cancer he devoted every drop of what limited energy he had to helping my grandma and making her happy. She still keeps her wedding ring on.

My mom tried to take it off and replace it with a look-alike fake diamond ring so she wouldn’t lose the real one. But my grandma kept her hand bent and finger angled so it was impossible to slide off. I know she doesn’t remember his personality or the way he looked, but I also know there’s a reason she didn’t let my mom take the ring off. I like to believe that she can still feel the band on her finger, and it gives bit of hope and happiness like my grandfather once did.

When she was given the news of his death, she cried. Though I don’t think she’s ever shed any more tears after those. Ever since he died, she hasn’t remembered how to show emotion, or do much of anything else.

With his death, whatever was left of my grandma’s memory disappeared as well.

After this downfall, my grandmother moved into the Sunrise Assisted Living Home. Although this place is nice and homey, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s like a comfortable mental hospital. Once, a woman asked me where she could find a phone to call her mother because she wanted to “go home now”. Another woman is almost always cradling her “baby” in her frail arms as she tries to feed a doll’s plastic mouth sugar-free cookies.

In the main room, there are at least 20 people. All still have a pumping heart and blood running through their veins. Sure, these people are alive. But they aren’t living. Living people have stories to tell and glorious moments that define their lives to share. They communicate, they laugh, they cry.

The people in this room can’t do any of that.

The whole situation pushes me into a wave of sadness. I don’t want to cry. Besides the employees, I’m one of the only emotionally capable people in the nursing home, and I don’t want to show a sad face.

So instead I raise my lips into an artificial smile.

When I visit about once a month, I usually find her in her room. All of the rooms are painted the same calming yellow, but we hung up happy looking art, bright photos and reassuring bible verses all over hers, like the decorations in her old house. Even though she doesn’t notice our attempt to make the room homey, it makes my family feel better–like the pieces of her old home will turn her room into a haven where she can escape the insanity around her.

She always sits by a floral armchair that used to sit in the house she once shared with her husband.

When she sits there, I always try to start a conversation. “Grammy,” I usually say when I’m about to start talking to her. Then, in a voice I use for the little kids who I babysit, I tell her about little things going on in my life: what my grades are in school, who I’m going to Homecoming with, or what I bought when I went shopping.

I know I’m really talking to myself; she isn’t processing any of what I say. I always begin to question why I even bother wasting my voice. But I know why: against all reason, I still have hope that she’s listening. I have hope that there’s something happening inside her head that she’s incapable of communicating to people around her.

I’ve always prided myself in looking at the sunny side of things, but Alzheimer’s is something that’s tough to find a silver lining on. The disease baffles me; How could my grandma lose 66 years of priceless memories in less than 24 months? I need an explanation for this awful disease. Everything happens for a reason. Nothing, not even a thief, is all bad.

So I close my eyes, and I hold onto that hope.