Grandma

This is pretty much the first real essay I ever wrote, which I wrote for English class last winter...I suppose it really doesn't require a backstory, or much if any explanation at all for why I wrote it, as I figure it probably for the most part explains itself. So, enough with the preamble. Here's the essay.


            My grandma loves me. She always has, and I hope she always will. It has been nearly three years since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a memory-robbing, mind-destroying disease. There is no prevention, no cure, just medication that slows down the process. Like a frayed cloth unraveling, she slowly, slowly loses abilities that she took for granted a few short years ago.
            A lot has changed in recent years. A while before Grandma was even diagnosed, my family noticed that she was not exactly herself. She became very forgetful, sometimes moody, and much less social than she was previously. Finally she was not safe living alone anymore, and she came to live with my family and me. After that, she started thinking she saw people in her daydreams that had passed away many years before, hearing their voices, and remembering visiting them just an hour earlier. It soon became clear to all of us that it was quite possibly something more serious than just old age. My parents took her for a check-up and found out that we had been right. The doctor diagnosed her and that was that. No more pretending, hoping, praying that she was okay. The disease was there, and it was real. Her doctor prescribed a medication for her, which made her seem like her usual self…for a while.
         Eventually she started showing signs of the illness again, and again we were confronted with an enemy that could be battled but not defeated. We could not see it, hear it, or touch it, but we could sense its effects. She continually lost her mental and social capabilities until she would no longer go out to eat with us, or even go to church, something she had done all her life. But despite all the confusion and sadness that surrounded these changes, one thing remained constant: She loved me, and I hoped she always would.
            Grandma doesn’t live with us anymore, but in a nursing home not far away from me, and I visit her often. Her home is different every time I go there. At times it is bustling with activity, like a bee hive, with people walking around, talking and laughing or playing games together. Other times, it is as still and quiet as an abandoned lake; no noise or movement to cause ripples, just people sleeping or reading the newspaper silently.
        My grandma and I know many of the people that live there by name and enjoy listening to them recall their life stories. There is a woman who has climbed several mountains and has some really amazing pictures to prove it. Another tells me what it was like when she was a child, and how hard it was for her parents to keep her and her eight siblings in shoes when they were growing up. There are many others, whose life experiences are far greater than my own, and each of their stories is like a photo album, preserved and treasured forever by those who hear them. It is sad, though, that many of them, like my grandma, are forgetting much of their life stories, and the mark that they have made on the world.
        My grandma also likes to tell me stories about her past, and I love listening. She has told me of the first time she met my grandpa when she was fifteen years old, and about many of the places they visited when they went traveling together after they were married. Some days, she will tell me a story, a memory that is so clear and precise that I become like a child listening to a fairy tale, enchanted by it. Yet other days, she will begin sharing a memory, and the memory becomes tangled with another memory, as a fishing line may catch on another and twist into knots until it becomes impossible to fix. Sometimes it feels as though she is far away, in a world that only exists inside her mind and other times she is completely there, with me in real life. No matter where she is, though, she always tells me she loves me.
            For a while when I visited, we would play “Chinese Checkers” or “Bingo”, her favorite games. Eventually she forgot how, so we found other things to do when we are together. We watch “Shirley Temple” movies and take walks together, but mostly just talk. She asks me the same questions, and tells me the same things over and over again, but I don’t mind. Inside her thoughts, she is whirling backwards through time. Although an elderly woman with many grandchildren and a few great-grandchildren, she now usually sees herself as a much younger woman, and sometimes she doesn’t even think of me as her granddaughter. Sometimes I’m an old school friend, a cousin or a niece, but I’m always Aubrey, and she still loves me.
       Recently, Grandma’s doctor told us that the medication had done all that it could do for her. Now it was only making her more anxious, and not helping her memory much anymore. She stopped taking the pills a few months ago and since then every time I visit her it seems like her mind has degenerated even more from the last time I saw her. But as it gets harder and harder for us, her family, to see her losing abilities so quickly, it gets easier for my grandma. She now rarely realizes it when she forgets simple things and when she does, she doesn’t get upset about it like she used to. I am glad for her that she is more at peace than she was before, and enjoys being a part of her world, even though it isn’t always reality. At least she is happy.
         I don’t know how Grandma will be a year from now. Will she still be able to walk and communicate? I wonder if she will know my name, and that she loves me. What other changes are going to happen inside her mind? Will she even be around? One thing I do know is that through my whole life she has loved me, and she loves me still. And I love her with all my heart. I know I always will.