On Memory

When my Grandfather’s mind began to unravel, my grandmother kept it hidden easily, slipping the trinkets he misplaced into his pockets, finishing his sentences when he forgot people’s names. Ten years younger than him, she was so sure she’d be around to cradle him through this illness. So when her heart burst in their bathroom alone at night when she was 68, everyone was unprepared.

My grandparents lived out of state, and their visits were often tainted by screaming matches between my mother and hers, something lingering in the history of their relationship that I didn’t quite understand. But I saw the hurt on my mother’s face when my grandmother spat at her that I was a brat, right in front of me, when I was barely old enough to remember, but I did. And I never forgot the way my grandfather stood there stoically, supporting his wife with his silence, never coming to my mother’s defense, or mine.

I never felt I knew him well. I knew only the clouded spots on his nails at the end of long slender fingers, his snow-white hair still full and thick to the end. When he moved in, I was 16. So it did not feel like an opportunity but an upheaval of my life at the center of the universe. Something I had to maneuver around, so I did.

I avoided going down to the kitchen early in the morning, where he’d be cutting a banana into his yogurt, gently, with a butter knife against his thumb. Wanting to talk but stumbling over multiple names until he found mine, or didn’t. I ate pop tarts with one hand while driving to school to avoid breakfast at the table because I didn’t know how to have a conversation with someone who was losing their memory.

I did not join him on his daily walks. Around the neighborhood, and then up and down our block after he got lost. And then pacing back and forth on the strip of cement in front of our house, clutching the garage door opener in case he stepped one house too far. And then not at all.

I do remember one morning in the kitchen, him telling me that it was his 50th wedding anniversary, his eyes brimming as he choked on the words that this should have been the happiest day of his life. I do not remember what I said in response, probably nothing meaningful, rushing out the door so he wouldn’t see me cry.

It wasn’t long until I heard my mother crying in the night in her bed, her arms crossed over her eyes, realizing that she couldn’t take care of him. Until we sent him to an assisted living facility that he asked to come home from every time I visited out of guilt and obligation.

All those times when I was counting down the minutes until it had been an appropriate length of time, and I could leave, I could have asked him questions, or at least reminded him who he was. I could have said, here is the hand that held my mother’s on the way to school and fits in mine too. Here is the photo of the red house where you raised her. Here is the bench that you built. Here is the tree over your wife’s grave, keeping her cool.

But I didn’t. Because here is the wish I’m ashamed of—that you were the type of grandparent who had a fun nickname like Papa or Gramps, who came to my dance recitals, who called me on my birthday. Who would have intervened, gotten to know me, before it was too late and dementia stole all but your oldest memories. Leaving me with the responsibility to build this relationship that had never fully bloomed.

I have heard people remember their childhoods even at the end. So when the disease comes for me, will I still know this guilt for what I did and what I blamed you for? It was too heavy a burden for a child to carry, and I never got to tell you that I forgive you. And was I still a child at 16? And even if I wasn’t, would you forgive me?

Lucky

Yes, all women, but not me, not really. I was lucky. There was only that time leaving Costco as a child with my mom, where a man sitting in the bed of his pickup truck, legs dangling against the metal warmed by the sun, grunted that he’d like to take me home with him. Our cart filled with snacks for children. Mini muffins, applesauce, goldfish crackers. There was only me asking my mom what he meant, and her gripping my hand closely, picking up her pace as she rushed us to the car.

I was lucky. There was only that time at my high school job at the smoothie shop, standing on the intersection corner with a sign. When a man in a car pulled up next to me, gesturing to his lap, where he held his fully erect penis in his palm.

There was only that night my freshman year of college that couldn’t be what it had started to seem as the pieces fell in place over the years. Because that had never happened to me. Even though I was falling-down-drunk and he was sober. Even though the next morning I had to say what happened, and did we use protection, and it’s okay because I’m on birth control anyway. Even though I left feeling like something was wrong, but hadn’t I been the one to knock on his door, looking for someone to soften the sting of my first relationship ending? And hadn’t he been quite out of my league? I was lucky.

There was only the time that I wrote in my 5th grade diary that a boy in my class wouldn’t stop saying he wanted to have sex with me. And my mom read it and told the school. And rather than be happy it stopped, I felt so ashamed that I had gotten him in trouble, when it was only a joke, only flattering. There was only the day he called my house 50 times in a row when my parents were out, his last name flashing on the Caller ID over and over and over. And I was terrified to pick up but didn’t know how else to make it stop.