I don’t know if I remember my grandmother.
I remember emotions. I remember feeling loved, hearing her laugh and her making me laugh. I remember her telling me good night as the last sliver of light from the hallway was snuffed out by a closing bedroom door. But I don’t know how much of her I can remember.
Which is frustrating because she’s still alive.
My grandmother has been suffering from dementia for a few years now. I realized something wasn’t right a while ago. What I didn’t realize was how little of those previous years I could vividly recall.
As her brain becomes more affected, she loses more of me. She sometimes calls me the wrong name, forgets where I go to school or if I’m in college at all.
But I’m losing her too. Or at least I think so.
I’ve struggled to come to terms with the fact that I’m not sure how much of this is the disease, and how much is her. I feel like, at the beginning, I could parse the two, but my memory is fading.
I think I miss the old her, but I don’t know what that looks like. I balance that with still loving the person who she is now, because it’s not her fault this is happening.
I just wish I had a warning.
I wish someone had told me, “By the way, hold on to these memories, because someday, she won’t be able to.”
Memories are balloons. They hover and float, sometimes they slip and fly away. I just wish I had known which ones to tie down.
I can only imagine how difficult this is for my parents, aunt and uncle. They have the memories I don’t. They know how she was before this, they have something to mourn. A person to remember. In a dark, deeply sad way, I’m thankful.
I have ideas. Concepts, notions, stories, beliefs, feelings – nothing concrete enough to tie a string to.
My grandmother’s memories float away with mine. Mine of her and hers of herself. We both lost the knowledge of who she was before.
There’s a common myth that dementia skips a generation. The disease is very rarely hereditary, but because its appearance seems random, people look for patterns. I have no greater risk of getting dementia because my grandmother has it.
But in a way, I already do.
My knowledge of my grandmother before her disease has quickly eroded, softened and brushed away by years of taking my own brain for granted, thinking my hands were big enough to hold every string.
By the time my grandmother stops recognizing me altogether, I’ll have done the same with her.
Not because I have the disease, but because I don’t.
