Alzheimers impact on a grandson.

Mom and me a few years into this journey...she was feeling lost, I was experiencing loss.

My family has suffered great loss because of my mothers battle with Alzheimers. I post regarding this journey because it has been very cathartic to write about it. Its always my hope that it helps others who may be walking this same path find solace knowing they do not walk alone.

My nephew has written, as my oldest son put it so well, "an incredibly powerful and tragic account" of the loss he has suffered, as this disease has advanced on his grandmothers life.

With Noah's permission I share now, his beautifully heartfelt account of his loss. 

Thank you Noah.

Her smile was bright and full, her animated, blue eyes reflected the joy of the morning sunrise. Her mother’s jewelry peaked from her humble clothing, sparkling, just like her white smile on her soft meek face. She was put together, stylish, picture perfect. This was the image of woman who had learned how to live, and this presentation is how I wish to remember her. My grandmother has not died, not in the earthly sense, but she has to me. Like many deaths, the demise of her memory was a cancerous process that lasted for years, until it soiled the memory of her true self to those that loved her most. Today, all one would see is the skeleton of a person: a body that has no physical substance anymore, no muscle, no fat, no spirit. Her confused, dry smile shows rotting, stinking gums between lines of dried tears. Confined to her bed and covered in damaged, bruised skin, she refuses to look directly at a camera, as if she knows, as if she is embarrassed. She is irritated and upset, not because we are observing her characteristics, but really that she doesn’t even know what her characteristics are, or even who she is. My grandmother has died, at least to me. The person who claims residence of the battered tomb that is my grandmother’s pathological body hardly resembles that comforting woman with the kind, cheery, blue eyes. I have many fond memories of my grandmother, whom each of us grandchildren fondly referred to as Grammy B. To me, Grammy B was the type of grandmother you would see in a comedy that would surf in shark infested waters or go skydiving for fun, despite her age. She always seemed that she, specifically, could do no wrong, and, if she did, she found some way to make up for her mistakes. She was fun, inspiring, and altogether a joy to be around, but she knew how to be a grandmother too. Grammy B was the type of grandmother I would talk with about anything: we talked politics, discussed all my love interests, and predicted the fate of the world. She always would ask me if I was dating a girl, what her name was, or why I was not dating her. I loved the fact that I could invest secrets in her and still get realistic parental advice that I would never obtain from my own parents. I remember her once admitting that she wished she could be more for me, the fuller person that dementia had stolen from her. In the end, she never needed to be anything for me to love her, she just had to be. It was a cool, clear summer night, and my grandparents had invited my entire family their house, located across the street from ours. My thirteen year-old self ran, expecting to smell my favorite home-cooked meal of chicken and dumplings, mashed potatoes, and green beans for dinner when I reached the door. I rushed into the house thrilled to see my grandmother in the kitchen. She wasn’t in the kitchen; she was sitting in her bedroom, only lit by the light of the dying sun, whispering words to my mother, both women covered in black tears of mascara. My older sister dragged me out of the reposing room, anguish written on her face. I asked what had happened, she simply replied, “Grammy B was diagnosed with dementia earlier today.” I recall, out of all her nightmares, my grandmother’s greatest fear would be to forget everything. That night, we all prayed for healing. God did not listen. The next two years, dealing with my grandma barely differed from normal: we would still watch a pastel-colored sun rise to disturb the cool of the morning and interrupt a silent breeze with the trumpeting song of day while we enjoyed a slice of moist chocolate cake and a cup of steaming hot coffee; we built thousand piece puzzles together as usual while listening to Frank Sinatra and the dog singing in the background; we would work out in the mornings together, me doing ten pushups for every fifteen-second exercise she completed to lose the weight from our breakfast habits. You could feel the tension in the air, but nothing seemed to have changed. My grandmother’s dementia did not seem to take effect until I was seventeen. She became so frustrated that she forgot the simplest of things, like how to iron correctly or to feed her puppy that my parents later adopted. Her delicate, soft hands would be covered in burns, bruises, and cuts to match her heart. Her husband added to her overwhelming stress. The once navy seaman had grown into the expectation of having the perfect homemaker when he retired until death; my grandmother once had the pleasure of doing most every inside chore for her husband. The cliché, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” comes to mind when I think of how my grandfather, “GP,” used to act. He struggled relearning his independence, having to start cooking his own meals or having to learn to socialize with people who were not his wife or dog. The hardest part my grandfather had to endure was degrading the image of the love of his life in his mind to that of a mental patient whom he had to watch constantly observe and critique. Grammy B could no longer remember if she had taken her morning pills, so she might as well take them again, except all the pills were really meant for GP, and now she’s ranting about invisible squirrels in her room. He mourned so heavily that he expressed his grief through his stubbornness to change how he lived his life; he assumed nothing had changed and tried to convince my slowly deteriorating grandmother the same. When I was eighteen, I had the pleasure of being able to care for my grandmother alone while GP left town to visit family. One night, I woke to real, terrified screaming that you would never hear in a Hollywood classic; this breathless yelp cried for help, for anyone to save her. I ran into her room to find my grandmother curled in a ball on the floor by her bed. “Help me,” she repeated frantically between panting and sweating fingers covering her face. Her shaking hands grabbed my body that she sobbed into. “I saw death.” She whispered lucidly, “It almost found me while I was sleeping.” I brought her back onto her bed to sit and talk about our favorite things until her body stopped trembling and would rock to the rhythm of sleep and soft jazz like we had done so many more times before. She fell asleep thanking me, or rather her husband whom she thought I was, and I stayed awake, finally earning my grandfather’s watchman duties. Grammy B no longer conceived clear thoughts; she stuttered, or simply ended sentences, frustrated that she could not think of the words to finish constructing the phrase. I had learned to abandon my emotions dealing with my grandmother; yes, this woman was my blood, but I became her psychiatric nurse. My family learned, if Grammy B was throwing a tantrum, to contact me to settle her. I would calm her with stupid jokes and chocolate treats, assuring her whatever she did wrong turned out to be fixable and always comical. When she would begin to give up on trying to state a thought because she couldn’t remember the rest of a word, I would suggest words that would make no sense, causing her to laugh at a sentence that, altogether, held little importance. For instance, she couldn’t find something in her purse that began with the sound “Juh,” so I would suggest, “Giraffe. Jupiter. Jiminy Cricket,” and so on. I learned from my grandmother that people remember most what they feel; you can forget a person’s name, but far less likely how they made you feel. So, I always tried to make my grandmother feel comfortable, the one luxury she could no longer afford because of dementia. If she thought I was her boyfriend, I would pretend to be the most romantic man in the world. If she thought we were teenage best friends, I would tell her the rumors of high school life. For the fewer times she realized I was her grandson, I would pity her; with dementia, fantasy is always fonder than the bully of reality. I learned to adapt myself to whomever she needed me to be, and, because of that, even to this day she still seems to know who I am, or at least when I don’t shave. My grandmother died December 21, 2014. My dedicated mother convinced her sisters and their families to join us in visiting my grandmother four days before Christmas. I dreaded viewing her. Just a few weeks beforehand, my grandmother had not been properly handled by her previous nursing home and ended up slipping, falling, and losing almost all of her teeth, my grandmother’s second greatest fear. My grandmother loved to constantly laugh smile, but instead she cries in silence. I couldn’t see her like this again. However, we all proceeded anyway. The nurses rolled her out of her the doldrums that was her niche to listen to us play Christmas songs and share our love for her. Her smile was befuddled and toothless, yet her lifeless, glazed, grey eyes reflected joy. She did not recognize us, but she did recognize love. She was peaceful, content, and that is how I watched my grandmother die. My grandmother had not truly passed away. My sister visited Grammy B, bringing my grandmother’s great grandchild with her. Grammy B was lucid enough for three seconds to express absolute joy over the gift of new life in the family before returning to a state of complete comatose. Since I’ve last seen my grandmother in December, she has lost over eighty pounds, now that she no longer has the capacity to truly consume any substance or the energy to even try to move. Like after experiencing the death of a loved one, our holidays include an empty chair for her, soft whispers and tears shed in her memory; our silence reeks of our thoughts all screaming her name. It is often hard for any of us to realize that a woman of such love, faith, and wisdom is suffering in such a state that she no longer represents anything more than a grey, starving twilight of a person. At night, my family no longer prays for healing for Grammy B, but that she would leave us in her sleep, painlessly and effortlessly. My mother cries for fear of my grandmother dying, but doesn’t understand my passiveness. My grandmother, the woman who I loved whole-heartedly had died already and only her tomb awaited eternal slumber.
by Noah Cooke 2016