Coming to rest. [Updated.]

Having my great-grandmother’s desk, with the same lamp that’s always sat atop it, and her small Diarmuid Harrington sketch of the Golden Gate Bridge hanging above — it feels like a tiny corner of home, right in my living room.

ETA: I took a picture. Lo, I am functional!

My great-aunt and some family friends brought me my great-grandmother’s desk and file cabinet today. Once I got everything set up, it made a very nice and homey “office” in the corner of our living room. Almost everything in this photo (desk, file cabinet, framed print on the wall, monitor, lamp, some tchotchkes) was my great-grandmother’s, and I may never leave this space again. It even smells like Gram’s house.

There’s also a set of extremely old decorative plates that will be filling the empty spaces behind my chair, but those have to wait for Michael’s arrival. Man wields hammer; woman flutters lashes! This is how things work, for I am very lazy.

Also, please to ignore the stain under my desk (pre-schooler perils) and the unsightly jumble of cords behind my chair. (Now that I think of it, the blue carpet isn’t any better — but that at least is not my fault.) I spent two hours today swapping desks, another hour organizing, and two hours filing. It’s time for something fruity, cold, and a little bit alcoholic. I am clearly far too busy to Photoshop.

About stuff.

I know I said I’d update by Wednesday, but you’ll notice I didn’t technically specify which Wednesday it would be. So this update could be early! Really, I’m not a huge slacker.

… Except I am, of course. I don’t know what is up with me lately, but I just don’t want to do anything. I want to sit around watching TV with occasional breaks to lie in the bath and read a book. I am still doing things, of course — working, cleaning the house, playing with Connor — but all the non-essentials have fallen by the wayside. This might be part of the “grieving process” (a phrase I hate with a fiery passion, or would if I had the energy for fiery passionate hatred), or it might just be a reaction to the turning season. Whatever it is, it’s kicking my ass, in a slow-boring-death-by-ennui sort of way.

I have also discovered that one of the drawbacks of my awesome job is that it’s always there. Every moment I’m home and not immediately occupied, I feel like I should be working. Part of that is the massive water bill we have to pay on Monday, but a much larger part of it is just that the job is always there and I have some weird Protestant mentality wherein a single moment not working sends me spiralling into panic and self-flagellation. I’m working on it, but in the meantime that water bill still has to be paid. This whole dynamic is so strange — I don’t want to work, like, at all, but then if I don’t work I hate myself and end up frantically trying to make up “missed” time, even if that time didn’t need to be spent working in the first place.

I don’t know. It’s all avoidance, I think. The truth is that I just don’t feel right for some reason. I am in the doldrums. Not the big, dramatic, oh-my-God-I-want-to-die doldrums, just the everything-sucks-and-I-just-want-to-be-still doldrums. It’s boring and kind of painful and it makes everything, including updating this here blaaaaawg, pretty difficult.

So. The service for my great-grandmother was lovely, and it was really nice to see my family and my great-grandmother’s friends — many of whom were incredibly kind to me throughout my childhood. We stopped at the park by my great-grandmother’s house afterward, the same park where she took me for swimming lessons and walks and bike rides and games and secret garden-hunting, and I had a long, hard cry in the car while Connor and Michael played. I wanted to drive by her house (which is now my great-aunt’s house), but I felt weird about it — I wanted to stop by the house and visit her gardens, her rooms, but it wasn’t really her house anymore and my aunt certainly wasn’t having a better day than I was.

Then we picked up our lives again, went to Target for Connor’s Halloween costume, and came home. Anti-climax, but what can you do? My drained, pessimistic self wants to get all woebegone about how NOTHING! There’s NOTHING you can do, everything is pointless, oh agony, oh the humanity, but I won’t let it. This will pass and life will start to interest me again and before you know it I’ll be updating three times a week just like I used to. Promise.

Wilma Rachel Duncan, 11/1913 — 09/2007

My great-grandmother died just before 1:00 this morning. If you guys have some spare good thoughts, prayers, or energy, send her out with style, would you? Thanks.

Reprise.

I have a hard time accepting my great-grandmother’s Alzheimer’s. Mostly, this is because it doesn’t really seem like Alzheimer’s. When I see her and talk to her, she’s coherent and loving — barely present, already leaving, but still aware. She knows me. She knows Connor, even though she only met him once, two years ago. She makes sense when she talks. I don’t see her very often. Once or twice a year on average, and it’s currently been well over a year. Still, it just doesn’t make sense.

There are a lot of reasons for me to have a hard time with this: I love her. She practically raised me when I was very small. She has always been on a bit of a pedestal for me. I know that my family mostly doesn’t like her. Love her, yes. Like her, not so much. I know that my aunt, who first cried dementia, mostly wants my great-grandmother’s money. I know that my grandmother, who is caring for her now, is very busy and completely unsentimental. I hesitate to call her cold because she has been amazingly kind and loving to me on occasion, but she is definitely a harshly practical woman with a lot on her plate. It’s easy to put your elderly mother into a home and check in often; it’s less easy to look at what’s really going on and deal with the situation holistically. (In the sense of taking care of the entire picture, every problem as a whole.)

My great-grandmother isn’t prone to outbursts. She doesn’t think it’s 1937, or that her daughter is her young sister. She hasn’t forgotten the details and timeline of her life. It seems to me that she’s just old, and very tired. She has a hard time taking care of herself. A really hard time, to be honest — when she was still living independently she would often go outside in just a T-shirt and underwear to water the lawn. She stopped cooking for herself, stopped taking care of her garden, stopped doing pretty much everything. I can see why, after a year or two of doing everything for her, my aunt had enough. I can’t see why my aunt assumed that my great-grandmother stopped doing these things because she’d forgotten how. She hadn’t and hasn’t forgotten. She’s just so damn tired.

When she forgets things, it’s like normal forgetting compounded by age. She calls people by the wrong names a lot, but never (as far as I’ve seen) in a way that indicates she really thinks those names are correct. It’s more like a mother of five running the gamut (“Billy — Adam — Susie — I mean, DAWN!”) than it confusion regarding who she’s speaking to. She spends most of her day in silence and doesn’t ever really engage in conversations, but it doesn’t seem like she’s somewhere else. It just seems like she’s tired, and maybe in her 94 years she’s said all she needs to say.

I can accept that maybe she just doesn’t care anymore. That’s really how it feels — like she’s done, she’s ready to go, and she’s not interested in chitchat while she waits for the train. She seems very peaceful to me, both in person and on the phone. She’s waiting, I think, in a holding pattern before she goes somewhere better. She’s ready to be with her husband, with her mother, and with her creator. She’s not part of here anymore. She reminds me of someone engaged in a creative task that requires a high level of concentration, giving only the vaguest of attention to everything else around her. What she does not remind me of is a person with Alzheimer’s. She does not remind me of someone with dementia. It’s not that I’ve had a lot of experience with these things, but I have had some. I just don’t see it. It’s very hard to know whether I’m not seeing it because it’s not there or whether I’m not seeing it because it’s not what I want to see. It’s hard to know where the lines are. Some of my great-grandmother’s behavior over the past few years could definitely be called weird, and it’s definitely stuff she never did before, but it just doesn’t feel like she’s losing herself.

It feels, instead, like she’s losing us. Letting us go. Letting herself go, and not in the skipping-lipstick sense. I just wish there was a little more dignity for her. I wish her age didn’t make it so easy to label her demented and a nuisance. I wish it were possible to say, “You know what? Maybe this is just how she needs to be, maybe we should just let her be.” I feel like she should spent the last of her life the way she spent the rest of it — on her own terms, doing her own thing, saying “balderdash” to anyone who didn’t like it. I want to let her be my Grammy all the way to the end.

—-

Apparently, once I break the seal on a subject stuff just gushes out. Sorry for two very similar entries in one week, guys.

It’s hard to be an adult sometimes. It’s hard to be a person sometimes. There are rough lessons that everyone on the planet has to learn, but they’re always personal. Loss, change, grief, there isn’t really any universality for this stuff. We all go through it, but we all go through it so differently — at different times, in different places, under different circumstances, and always with different hearts.

My great-grandmother is very sick. I’ve known it for a long time, really; her care was handed over to my great-aunt and my grandmother years ago. I have about a million false starts saved up, but every time I try to write about this… I don’t know. I just don’t know. Everything I say disintegrates.

We all have hard lessons to learn, right? I don’t know what my lesson is here. My great-grandmother, my Grammy, is the person who taught me my first round of lessons. Big ones, little ones, it didn’t matter. She taught me how to keep a garden, that it’s important to wear proper foundation garments, and that writing would take me everywhere. She wrote me a letter when I was seven and confusing my stories with reality — the first line was, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave…” I’d never heard that particular aphorism before, and her letter helped it make sense: Don’t lie, because eventually your sin will find you out, and you will feel like an ass.

She taught me other things too: Take care with your thoughts, because they become actions. If you’re going to eat, learn how to cook and eat things that are good. Brush your teeth twice a day and make sure you get to the dentist every six months. I’ve never had a cavity or eaten a Pop-Tart; both are because of her. I don’t own any hot pants but I do own three half-slips because of her. She taught me to change the bed linens every week and tried to teach me to wash the dishes after every meal.

She played games with me when I couldn’t sleep. I’d spend the night at her house and find her in her red rocker in the living room at three in the morning. She’d get me a glass of milk and a pillow, and I’d lie on the floor playing this poetry game she made up — she’d quote a couple of lines of a nursery rhyme, then I’d have ten seconds to come up with another that began with the word hers ended on. She’d snap out, “Adverb!” and I’d have three seconds to say, “Brightly!” She’d give me words to spell, sometimes paging through her ancient dictionary to find the best ones, the ones she knew I’d sink my teeth right into. She would do this as long as it took until I could sleep.

When we washed dishes together, she helped me make up a story about how each dish was a star that we had to polish for its nightly appearance. She didn’t tell me, “I know washing dishes is boring, but it’s not supposed to be fun.” She told me, “I know washing dishes is boring but it doesn’t have to be,” and that is a lesson I have carried with me forever.

I don’t even know where I’m going with this. Every time I try to address the immediate issues — Alzheimer’s, bad falls, body failing — I get mired in all this other stuff. False starts. There is so much to remember and I just feel like I have to. She can’t anymore. She is the sharpest woman, just the smartest and strongest woman I’ve ever met in my life, and she can’t even remember where she is most of the time. She was always the most capable person in my life, able to pay the bills and keep the garden and run her home and build sandboxes and can her own tomatoes, and now she’s in a nursing home. On the dementia unit.

When I was ten, I was dead set on having a cool backpack. Sometimes when you’re poor and a kid, you get fixated on really strange things. Like it won’t matter that your clothes are from last year’s sale rack at Wal-Mart if you just have a really cool bag for your books. Grammy took me all over town to find the right thing, and I finally settled on a Winnie the Pooh something-or-other. I didn’t even like Pooh, but all the other girls did, so you know how it was. Gram asked me over and over if I wouldn’t like something else, something sturdier, something a little less babyish, but I insisted on that stupid bag. When we got to checkout, the girl at the counter started pulling the wads of paper from the bag’s outer pockets and came up with two stashed bottles of nailpolish. I hadn’t put them there, but the look my grandmother gave me… I couldn’t bear it. I could not stand her disappointment, I could not stand the fact that she quietly paid for the bag even though she thought I’d done that. I get that same feeling every time I screw up; my first thought is, Oh, God, what would Gram think?

And it makes me a better person. I’ve never been steered wrong by my grandmother. I’ve never been let down by her. This woman who loved me, this tower of strength is going to leave me very soon. She’s already halfway gone, really, and I just wish I knew for sure that she wanted to go. The Grammy I know, though, wouldn’t want to go. This is just so fucking hard, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from it — is it even appropriate to be looking for a lesson in something so awful? She’s 94 years old, my hero, and declining in a truly awful way; is it right for me to be looking for any kind of lining to this cloud?

I don’t know, I don’t know. I hate the saccharine in the voices of my family when they speak of or to Gram. I hate that she’s in a home in Colorado, receiving wonderful care, but also where I can’t get to her. Go for a visit. Help with the garden. Something. I hate knowing that she doesn’t notice, doesn’t need. There’s just nothing I can do, and I’m going to miss her so godawfully. Some lesson.