Nana Part I Revisited

November 26th was the 9th anniversary of my grandmother’s passing. For reasons lost in the hallways of time my siblings and I always called her nana.

In 1993, three years before here death we had heard of Alzheimer’s but did not understand the seriousness of the illness. Nor did we understand how debilitating the disease became before deaths sweet release.

Until one has experienced the devastation wrought by this illness first hand it is impossible to understand the stress and strain it puts on the family, the caretakers and anyone who comes into close personal contact with the sufferer.

When nana was first diagnosed I had the response that I am sure quite a few people have. It could be worse; she could have had cancer or something else equally horrible. I thought what is Alzheimer’s but the gradual loss of memory.

Wrong.

As the disease progresses not only does the patient’s memory go but eventually the mind can no longer remember motor functions. Limbs become useless appendages drawn into claw like rigidity. The patients are no longer able to speak, feed themselves or perform the most basic of bodily functions.

As the end draws near they are little more than a spirit trapped in the husk of what once was a vibrant human body. Even more horrifying is that even at this stage of the illness brief lucidity appeared to return to nana’s eyes. On some primal level she was still self aware and understood what her existence had been reduced to.

Following is a piece from February of last year in which I tried to see the onset of the illness through her eyes.


In November her memory had begun to fade. Television left on when she went to bed. A burner still lit even after she had finished her meal. Keys left in the door upon her return from the store or mass. It’s nothing she thought, just old age catching up with me.

She would sit in the front window, late afternoon sunlight streaming over her shoulder warming her bones. On her lap sat a bible, King James version, which she would attempt to read when the day's work was done. Often she would find herself looking around, frowning, and struggling to recall what it was she had just read. Returning to the page no longer seemed to help, as she was fast becoming unable to recognize the simplest of words. So she returned the bible to the 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 events was nonexistent, which filled her eyes with tears of frustration. 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 the 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 irrationally her memory returned to focus and she remembered who he was. It did not happen everyday but when it did it took all of her self-restraint to sit with the person and pretend that everything was perfect.

Her life was becoming a daily battle, 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 co. but forgot to put 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 basket wadded up and thrown in the wastebasket.

Each and every night of that November before she fell asleep she said her prayers and asked God to spare her the loss of her memories. Please Lord, anything but that. But being a Christian woman who always placed her faith completely in her creator she would end her prayers with a solemn "thy will be done."