"The Alzheimer's face indicates only an absence. It is, in the most literal sense, a mask." John Bayley

I wrote this about my grandma sometime ago. In some ways I still believe it is true. BUT my older and wiser sisters remember a woman who was particular about everything, EVERYTHING. As I thought back to the minimal interactions I had with my grandma as a child, I could see it. She would hire us to clean her house, but it had to be just so: the sheets tucked here (corners were mitered), the floor mopped like this, the dishes washed like that. I remember that. I remember being terrified, because I never did it right.

Now, dementia is her constant companion, and we are losing her a little every day. Often she'll forget my name. She introduced me to my cousin as her own niece. She knows she loves us, she just can't always remember we are her granddaughters, instead of our husbands being her grandsons. So we suffer with her. She only knows she feels like a child as her independence is being stripped away for her own safety. We cry because she can't remember anything except what you don't want her to remember. Can't she remember all those years when her son visited her every Sunday, instead of the mistakes he has made? Can't she remember that Grandpa demolished the house they raised their children in the summer I met Seth? As garble of memory fills our conversations as she is unable to conceive the reality of what is happening this moment. Everything in her memory, from childhood to today, is the present. By those memories, she lives in the past. It's almost like she is stuck in a time warp sometimes. Neither here, nor there. I am grateful I came to know her and love her, as an adult, before we lost her completely to the abyss of this disease.


"Alzheimer's disease victims never recover and never stop getting worse. They cling to the barest threads of who they once were...All achievements are forgotten and faces of loved ones lost. There are endless days before death comes. Alzheimer's may be the cruelest disease." Meirendorf