The popular phrase in my family these days is, “We don’t know how much longer Gemmy’s going to be around.” Gemmy is what we call my 84-year-old grandmother (when we were little my sister and I couldn’t pronounce her chosen abbreviation, so GM became “Gem” and then “Gemmy”). What we mean is: We don’t know how much longer she’s going to remember who we are.
Gemmy is in the early stages of dementia.
Mostly she spends a lot of time asking where everybody is. My mom’s older sister and her two sons—ages eight and eleven—live with my grandmother in her apartment, and my mom’s younger sister, husband, and their two sons—four-year-old twins—stay across the hall, and my grandmother always wants to know, “Where are the kids?”
“They’re at school, Gemmy,” I’ll tell her. Or they’re at a play date, or soccer practice, or on their way home.
She’ll nod and return to straightening out their toys. Five minutes later: “Where are the kids?”
She also forgets to eat.
Once, she forgot my name.
She often says, “You know my memory isn’t what it…” and trails off, leaving out “used to be” as if to prove her point.
Most of the time I try not to think about it. Getting old scares me, especially because the condition is hereditary. My mother won’t talk about it, but my dad told me about when he accompanied her to visit her aging grandmother, and how she didn’t know who my mom was, and my mom cried, and my dad felt so helpless. I used to think I’d rather my brain go than my body. What must it be like, trapped in an aging shell with a sharp mind? But now I wonder what it’s like to have only holes where memories should be; to search for something that should be there, that once was, but now is fleeting; and, worse, to be aware that your mind can no longer do what it used to be so capable of.
When I was little, I was terrified of my grandfather and felt my grandmother was a slave to his illness and demanding nature: she rushed around their apartment to get him things, brewed funny Chinese medicines in strange teas, and took him to his doctor’s appointments and, later, dialysis. She did nothing for herself.
My most salient memory of my childhood time with them is one afternoon, when I was in the backseat of their car, and my grandmother asked me if I wanted ice cream.
Since my grandfather had always met any expression of emotion or excitement with disapproval, if not outright reprimand, I tried to be casual. I shrugged and said, “I don’t care.”
He swerved to the curb, slammed on the brakes, and turned around in his seat to yell at me. “How dare you say ‘I don’t care’ to your grandmother. How dare you show such disrespect.”
My grandmother sat, silent, pressing her lips together and staring into her lap. He returned to driving while tears streamed down my cheeks and I tried to muffle my sobs. Since when was “I don’t care” disrespectful? Was this a generational gap? Was it because he was Chinese, and I was only half-Chinese, half-Caucasian and identified more with Judaism than Catholicism? These questions came later. At the time I merely felt I had done something horrible—and somehow hurt my grandmother.
Needless to say, no ice cream. And I felt my grandmother was as much a victim as I.
Then my grandfather died when I was a preteen and I felt like my grandmother got to be her own person, finally. I discovered she had her own sense of style and we had conversations about fashion—about platform shoes! (Forgive us; this was the 90s)—about boys, college, dreams. I realized she had personality, as well as love and wisdom, in plenty.
These days, sometimes it’s like my aunts each have three kids instead of two. Occasionally postcards for nursing homes arrive in the mail and we recycle them.
I like to think we’re making my grandmother’s last years good ones. The kids keep her young, and the rest of us make sure she reads things other than People magazine. We pit her cherries, take her to McDonald’s for senior coffee with no sugar and three creams, and bring her half a sesame bagel with cream cheese and lox and four large sliced cubes of cantaloupe for breakfast. We know she loves pistachio ice cream, sleeping in late, and framed family photos. We make sure she eats and goes to exercise class and doesn’t lie in bed watching “Judge Judy” all day. Though I can understand why she likes it—you can jump in at any point and the drama is fresh and potent.
I lost her once. We stopped at a CVS and I stationed her in the magazine section—usually she stayed put—but when I returned she was gone. Panic rose as I asked people if they’d seen an elderly Chinese lady in a brown sweater set and they shook their heads, their eyes judging. I checked the bathroom, surrounding stores, had the manager page her, berated myself. When I found her, finally—the second time I knocked on the CVS bathroom door she must have heard the panic in my voice, decided to forgo her privacy, and answered—my relief was all-encompassing.
Later, on the phone with my sister, I worried about what would happen if Gemmy died on my watch.
“She probably will,” my sister said. “You’re the one who takes her out.”
Actually, that kind of swift severance is unlikely. I’m losing my grandmother the same way she’s losing her mind: slowly.
A friend of mine, whose father died after a long, slow battle in which my friend visited him several days per week, told me, “It doesn’t matter how much time you spend with them. When someone you love dies, it will never have been enough.”
My relationship with Gemmy now is simple. Once a week, I take her to get her hair washed at Fantastic Sam’s—one of her two major extravagances, the other being a fridge well-stocked with See’s dark chocolate—and we do lunch. Mostly she asks after my mom and sister and I repeat the same things every few minutes. I talk about my life or ask about hers. She often tells me she never thought she’d end up in LA, but you can’t beat the weather.
Sometimes, after lunch, we go out for ice cream.
