Nana Part 1

In November her memory began to fade. The TV left on when she went to bed. A burner still lit on the stove when she had finished her meal. Keys left in the door when she returned from the store. It is nothing she thought, just old age beginning to catch up with me.

She sat in the front window, with the late afternoon sunlight streaming over her shoulder and warming her bones. On her lap sat a bible, King James version, which she tried to read when the day's work was done. Often she would find herself looking around, frowning, and trying to recall what it was she had just read. Returning to the page did not seem to help, as she was no longer able to recognize the simplest of words. So she returned the bible to the book shelf promising to try again tomorrow.

She continued to attend Wednesday meetings at her senior club but the conversations became increasingly frustrating. A friend would ask her about yesterday's events and her mind would draw a blank. She remembered her childhood, she even remembered driving from Missouri to California in 1926, just her and her best friend exploring the back roads of America. For the life of her though her memory of current activities was nonexistent, which filled her eyes with tears of despair. So she withdrew from the club and began spending her Wednesday afternoons at home, sitting in front of the television watching reruns of The Golden Girls.

What scared her the most was not recognizing the friends and family that she was closest to. One Sunday she went to mass with her oldest grandson. He took her to breakfast and to the grocery store and helped her put away her purchases. She was sitting with him on her back porch drinking coffee when suddenly she had no idea who he was. Why is this person on my porch? Who is he? Should I scream? Should I call the police? Before she could act on any of these wild ideas her memory came back into focus and she remembered whom he was. It did not happen everyday but when it did she had to use all of her composure to sit with the person and pretend like everything was just fine.

Her life was becoming a daily battle, she was fighting as hard as she could to hold on to her memories. It was a battle she found herself losing more often than naught. She mailed her payment to the gas company but forgot to enclose the check in the envelope. One morning she found her glasses on the butter dish in the refrigerator and had no recollection of putting them there. The money counters from her church called asking about her most recent donation. The envelope she had deposited was filled with tissue paper, in looking around her house she found the twenty-dollar bill she had meant to place in the collection box wadded up and thrown in the wastebasket.

Now each and every night before bed she struggled to hold on to her most precious memories. When she said her prayers she begged God to spare her the loss of her sense of self. Please Lord, she would cry, anything but that. However, being a Christian woman who had always placed complete faith in her creator she inevitably ended her prayers with a solemn "thy will be done."