Memory

This is my KQED Perspective draft. Edits please! There will be others. --

Late in their long lives, both of my grandmas started to wander away. Or at least they tried. My maternal grandma would repeatedly try to go out the backdoor of the common room of her nursing home, towards the path that ran along the river, setting off the blaring building alarm. My paternal grandma would get on her motorized wheelchair scooter and speed down the sidewalk along the main highway. I was too young to really know my grandpa before he died, but my mom tells me he would walk into town, sit at a bar, and forget how to get home. All my grandparents have died now. During their wandering years, all three had a variation of dementia. When they had dementia, grandparents couldn’t remember where they wanted to go, couldn’t remember to take their pills, then their friends names, then the faces of their family members - me.

Who exactly are we when we don’t remember anymore? What are we without our memories? Our memories. My grandparent’s memories seemed to leave them progressively. But my memories of them didn’t disappear. I’d like to remember my grandparents not just for their individual capacity for memory but for all the memories of relationships that defined them during their lives. Those aren’t forgotten. To the contrary, they’re quite clear and they go on forever in a living chain. They’re alive in my cousins red hair, my love of pockets, taste for red-hots candies, and my impulse to grow parsley.

As my grandparents got older, their lives became more isolated. Yet if I think beyond their individuality and to their relationality, they seem to grow. Though independence is heavily valued in the world I live in, I want to speak for our relationality. At the end, my grandparents couldn’t take care of themselves. Just like a time in my life when as an infant I couldn’t take care of myself. We are far more relational than we like to think. I am a daughter to a mother, a partner to a partner, a younger sister to an older sister. When my grandma got dementia I didn’t become less a granddaughter. So she was no less of a grandmother.