Last Visit

The first time my grandma died was in 1995, and since then she has been increasingly unwell. I’ll confess, though, that even before her first death, there has always been a space between my grandmother and my sisters and me.  Unlike my mom’s mom, she was never a very grandmotherly grandmother.  I am sure that as a child I could not have articulated anything profound about my relationship with my grandmother, but luckily I lived in a world where I never had to question whether or not family loved me.  They did, and I never had to think about it.  She was one of two grandmothers in my life and therefore someone who must love me.  She just was who she was.  She and my grandpa moved down to Florida when I was nearing the end of elementary school, so by the time I was old enough to consider who she was, I once again didn’t see enough of her to feel the need to do so.

When my grandfather died in 2001, we discovered just how much he had been taking care of her. She had to be moved to assisted living immediately. She stayed there for a couple of years before it was clear that her mental functions required more specialized help, and I joined my family in cleaning out her apartment and winnowing down her possessions to almost nothing. In the process, we came across some odd but telling things: cards that were labeled and dated but not opened, broken appliances and duplicate appliances. Most poignantly, we found two watches that I had been missing since I was in junior high: watches I cherished and searched for diligently if not frantically for months and months, watches my parents had scolded me for leaving somewhere odd and losing. Because my room had contained the double bed, it was the guest room when we had company, and, apparently, my two favorite watches and who knows what else had gone home with my grandmother even before her stroke. How does one feel about that sort of thing? Lucky for me, this was found when I was an adult, when I had long since replaced the watches, and when I could see the tragedy as clearly as the inappropriateness of her actions.

Several years ago, when I visited my grandma, she was still in the ward of the nursing home for the confused and mentally unwell. While there, I became convinced that as one begins to lose the edges of oneself, the mental habits of a lifetime become more and more pronounced. An example was a little old woman named Gloria, who I did not know during her normal life but who, I'm assuming, must have been determined to celebrate the joys in life. She came up to my sister and me and said something along the lines of, "It's so good to see you again! I love your hair!" She walked up and down the hallway drifting into residents rooms delighting over this picture or that bouquet of flowers. Most amusingly, she came up to my grandma, who was using a walker and therefore carrying nothing, and said to her, "Oh! Where did you get that cheese?"

My grandma responded, "It's mine!" My sister and I looked around for the cheese in question.

"Well, it looks delicious!" bubbled Gloria, before moving off to admire someone else's imaginary possessions.

It came as a good cautionary tale: when the sense and the details of our daily interactions are eroded away by time or illness, what is the heart that is revealed beneath them? When, someday, I am faced with imaginary cheese, will I compliment it, hoard it, or share it? When my scenery is reduced to a locked hallway, will I admire it or resent it or worry that someone else might take it?

Surprisingly enough, although my grandma seemed not to remember many details about her past life, including some members of her family, during that same cheese walk, my grandma introduced me to an older gentleman in a three-piece suit. "This was my junior high teacher," she told me. The man must have been in his 90s, but he was only at the nursing home visiting friends. To him, my grandmother said, "This is my granddaughter. She's a teacher too." I didn't know that she even knew who I was, much less my current profession, something that had begun well after she seemed to be losing her ability to keep track of such things. I was touched, honestly.

In spite of that moment of recognition, however, I haven't been visiting my grandma, who still lives in that same nursing home about four hours from where I live. My dad and my aunts have reported that she understands and remembers less and less. She doesn't eat. She is too weak to walk and has been moved off the floor with locking doors. She sleeps almost 22 hours a day. She is wasting away to nothing: once taller and far more buxom than I am, she has shriveled down to 82 pounds. Last year they discovered that her body was no longer producing hemoglobin. They gave her transfusions with the hope that it would kick-start her body into producing hemoglobin again, but after repeated attempts, it became clear that this was not going to happen. My dad and aunts enrolled her in hospice.

So I knew that my trip to visit her this spring was probably going to be the last one before I travel out there one more time for her funeral. I was expecting it not to go well. I envisioned that she would not wake up, or, if she did, that she would stare at me blankly. I thought she would have no idea who I was. I was expecting her to be shriveled up and have lost her hair. I was expecting her eyes to be glazed over.  I was expecting neither to recognize nor to be recognized.

When we arrived, however, she was sitting up and watching TV, the only thing she has done with her waking hours for the last decade or two. Her hair was white but still thick and was combed and pulled back in a headband. She was under a blanket, so her body was not really visible. Her color was normal. She looked different than she had when I was child, but she still looked very familiar, somehow. Did she look familiar because one fourth of my genes and the genes of my sisters are hers? Because half of my dad and half of my aunts are her?  Did she look familiar because back when I was a child, she was my grandma? Or did she look familiar because somewhere under there, she still is my grandma? I don't know. The strength of the sense of recognition was both shocking and comforting.

I reminded my grandma who I was, and my parents reintroduced themselves. Then we introduced my children. I told her their names and ages and that they are her great-grandchildren. She said, "Bless them!" Then she said to us all, "You may go now." Her speech was very clear and formal--not at all what I was expecting—but the dismissal was not a surprise. Still, it's anti-climatic to drive four hours for a three minute meeting, especially if the meeting is the first in years and potentially the last of a lifetime.

We all left the room and found a large empty gathering room where the kids could run around and be kids. After a few minutes, I went back in to my grandma’s room. I was told not to be surprised if she didn't remember that my previous visit had been less than ten minutes ago, so I reintroduced myself. This time, without the crowd of people, my grandma looked at me for a moment and said, "You look so beautiful." My eyes filled.

I didn't know quite what to say to my grandma, who has had no interests for decades and whose interests from long ago do not in any way intersect with my own. I told her about being a runner. I told her that I am a stay-at-home mom. To this, she said, "I sure do love you."

For that moment I would have driven twice as far with twice as many children.  The trip was suddenly more than worth it.  Those few minutes alone with my grandmother redeemed the last two decades of personality disorder and estrangement.

I could be cynical and question how sincere this declaration really was, given that she doesn’t actually know me beyond perhaps being able to identify who I am and how I am related to her and that immediately afterwards my identify if not my presence was forgotten in my grandma’s desire to be moved to her bed.  It could very well be that she just knows that if someone comes to visit saying she is your granddaughter, even if you don’t really remember her, and if she fits your notions of beauty and feminine virtue, you must love her.  Maybe she had enough social savvy to know what to say or to know that hearing those words was I had come.

Then again, even if my cynical suspicions were to prove accurate—if one could ever find a way to prove anything regarding the mysteries of love and the human heart—those few moments were still worth the drive.  Even if my grandma saying she loved me was little more than conditioned response or the fulfillment of how she knows things ought to be, I think it still has value.  The love between the two of us is not sacrificial.  It’s not something we ever put into some grand action or even some mundane routine.  It probably wouldn’t be enough love to live on, if that was all I had.  But it’s not all I have.  Not by a long, long measure.  Two children sat in a car for four boring hours across featureless Indiana and never complained or criticized the trip because they knew it was important to me.  My husband did the driving all weekend, and he also never questioned the worth of spending money and two days of vacation.  My parents came on the trip as well and stayed at the same hotel and swam in the pool and took us to dinner.  Two cars full of love carried me into my grandma’s small room to hear those words, and that’s saying nothing of the love I left back home and scattered across the country in the form of friends, past and current, and more family.  In such a case, a little more love feels like enough.

Years ago, I had thought that my grandmother’s personality, at its most elemental core, was about her things.  How sad, if that had been the truth, given that each time she slipped farther and farther into her illness, she was moved from smaller to smaller abode, stripped, in the end, of nearly everything but a few trinkets that decorated her tiny nursing home room.  But in the last trip to visit her, I was forced to reconsider this assessment.  At the previous visit, years ago, only two things had seemed worth comment: her things (even the imaginary ones,) and her granddaughter.  Perhaps I should have thought about the fact that she wished to share me with others rather than the fact that she wished to hoard her imaginary cheese and squirrel away my watches.  Maybe, it counts for something that on my last visit to her, weeks before her death, she said to me, “I sure do love you.” 

What exactly that word “love” means has been debated by far more eloquent writers than I and in far more controversial settings than the one of which I write.  For me, the statements come down to a belief that whatever the word meant to my grandma, she meant it when she said it to me.

My grandma died on Saturday.  She had been unwell for so very long that the news was more a fulfillment of the inevitable than such news usually is.  And, truthfully, it doesn’t change a thing about my daily life.  I will confess that I too seldom even paused to think about my grandma asleep in her small room, or watching a TV show she couldn’t quite follow.  But her death still feels like a loss. There is one less person tying me to the past, anchoring the roots of my family tree, providing a clue to what makes me who I am.  With her life over, it seems like it will be far too easy to forget all about my grandma, about the twang in her speech, the bite in her remarks, the sound of her laugh.  But it’s not all gone.  I think maybe, if she were able, she would say that something good survives.

About ten years ago, when we were already quite aware that my grandma was slipping, we gathered at my aunt’s house during Christmas break.  My grandma commented that having seven grandchildren was a good showing for one lifetime.  When all but a small remnant of her had already fallen away, I’m glad I had the chance to hear from her lips again that she knew what was truly valuable.

Rest in peace, Grandma.  I love you too.