Two Faulty Memories, Young and Old
My mother lauds my memory. I am the constant reminder of birthdays and finder of lost keys, phones, and books. “I think I saw it by the coffee maker, Mom” or “Did you check by your bed? I think it’s there.” I rarely forget to do homework assignments or keep appointments with people. I can remember meaningless conversations two years removed. But my memory fails me in one realm. My maternal grandmother has what has been diagnosed as a mixture of vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s. I cannot remember Aileen Lewis Sharpe before the disease overtook her.
My marking stone for her descent into dementia is my Bat Mitzvah. During her visit for this event, she fell several times in the span of a week. My mom came to the conclusion that she wasn’t just physically losing her balance. No longer could she remember when to take her medications or if she had taken them for the day. She was accidentally overmedicating herself. Her mental balance was off, too. Soon, she was diagnosed as in the early stages of both memory loss disorders. She was eighty-seven. Over the last five years, my family has seen her fall farther and farther out of touch. First, it was the question of what my grade in school was. Then it was the question of where my late grandfather was. Has he divorced me, she asked? Later, while still living in her house, she asked where she was and when she was going to be home.
In much the same way memory has betrayed my grandmother, my memory betrays me: I cannot remember who my pre-dementia grandmother was. What did she talk like? What was it like when she did not ask me how old I was repeatedly? Or when she did not ask my brother how tall he was every minute? Who was she? Who was the woman that raised my own mom to be such a compassionate person?
I recall the things we used to do together. The dining room table at my house was home to many games of Crazy Eights and Rummikub. Her enormous king-size bed in Memphis was the location of nightly storytelling of both her original poems and classic children’s books. The ancient chairs in her bedroom were our stadium for watching her beloved Memphis Tigers play basketball. She talked about baseball, tennis, and being a tomboy in a time where girls were not given the opportunities to play organized sports. She talked about racism and women’s rights in the fifties and sixties in the small town in eastern Arkansas where she and my grandfather raised my mom and her siblings.
While I remember doing all of these things, I do not remember the woman with whom I did them. In each of these memories she is not the remarkable woman who I’ve been told so much about. She is not the remarkable woman who was present in the first thirteen years of my life, before the disease took her mind bit by bit. Instead, I picture the woman whose mind has betrayed her, yet whose body has not. I have no problem conjuring in my head the image of her sitting at the dining room table playing Crazy Eights. But it stops there. Her voice cannot be transformed from its current scratchiness to her younger smooth twang I’ve heard on home videos. Conversations with her fail to be fluid, with her ever present repeated questioning. She is not the woman who had the ability to play these games with me and tell these stories to me. Her present muddled state overwhelms my mind to the point of erasing the wonderful years we had with her.
I am a young woman with a healthy mind; why can I not remember who she was in those years? Why does her present demented state, only a tiny fraction of her life, dominate my memory? Why do these heartbreaking, immediate events and experiences overpower my older memories of her?
The day before I left to come to Carleton, I visited my grandmother at her nursing home. She is mostly deaf and almost completely blind. Both of these sensory losses compound the effects of the dementia.
She was sitting at the dinner table with her eyes closed, surrounded by other people suffering from the same sickness as she. I approached her with my dad and calmly, as not to frighten her, told her my name.
"It’s Leah, Emily’s daughter,” I said. I repeated this a few times to wake her from her oblivion.
“Emily?” She said, confused.
“No, it’s Leah. Emily’s youngest daughter.”
The slightest smile appeared on her face. “Oh, Leah, my baby.”
She followed this rare, bright moment with the startling admission that Jesus has saved her—a nonsensical thing for an all-her-life practicing Jew to say. I kissed her goodbye and told her I loved her. The whole visit was less than ten minutes and yet it is exhausting. I was tired, just as she was.
I know that it breaks my mom’s heart that I fail to remember who my grandma was. When I told her I was writing my first college paper on not being able to remember the great person my grandma was, I heard her pause over the phone. Watching someone slowly lose touch with everything she knows is not easy, she assured me. But maybe, she reminded me, all you need is some time between watching the sickness take hold and remembering her. Maybe—hopefully—she said, in the years to come, the memories of her healthy self will soon become more clear, and cloud over the memories of her present self. Your last memories of her do not have to be her last years of life, my mom said; she lived a remarkable life, you know.
Thanks for reading,
Leah
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