My Grandma: Reminders of Being Away

       Sometimes being far away from home hits you like a kick in the gut.  A reminder that every day, every hour, every minute away, is a minute in which the direction that your life takes is a step further away from the friends and family that make up a place that was once, or maybe still is "home."  There are moments and events that heighten this feeling.  Reminding you again that life goes on without you.  People make decisions that change who they are, your friends move forward while your life seem set on some odd, sideways track.  

       I had a bunch of those reminders this week, and they in turn reminded me of the first, second and third times I decided I was going to "have an adventure" and disappeared off into never-never land.  Knowing at least those second and third times, that life would not wait for me. This time, however, was different, and I knew it when I left.  It's different because the person who has always been the rock of my world honest-to-God might not be there when I go home, already isn't there in so many more ways than one.  I wrote this essay, mostly for myself, a year and a half or so ago.  A reminder that she was fading away, and an acknowledgement that there was nothing I could do to stop it.  Now I'm adding it to this blog, because I had a phone conversation with her today.  With my Grandma Haws.  A conversation that brought back the gut-wrenching reality that the most precious people in our lives are fragile, delicate and only ours for the briefest moments in time.

       My Grandma Haws.

My childhood was tumultuous at times, we never knew it, but my six siblings and I grew up below the federal poverty line.  My mom chose to stay at home and raise us instead of work, and while there were financial consequences to that, there were social and psychological benefits to it as well.  There were times, as a child, when the world did not seem safe to me.  I had moments when  all I wanted to do was run and hide and cry but couldn’t find anyone to cry on because my father was frightening, my mom had the new baby and I was the oldest---”a big girl now.”  A move (when I was 13) from Utah to Oregon further compounded this by separating me from my small, but tightly knit  social group (which ironically was made up of all the non Mormon girls in our whole town).  

But through all of this--and later on in high school and my first few years of college--there was one person that I knew I could always call, or run to or hide behind.  

My Grandma Haws not only moved from Missouri to live near my mom in Utah after my first sister was born, but she packed up her house when we moved to Oregon a decade or so later and followed us there.  She was the babysitter, the helper, the birthday card bringer, the baker, the person who made thanksgiving dinner and the one who let us hold huge trick-or-treating parties at her house in town so that we wouldn’t have to drive from house to house in the country where we lived.

She was also the person who rolled her eyes at me when my aunt gave me a ring for starting my menstrual cycles and the person who did not tolerate fits.  My Grandma  taught me to crochet (I now have several state fair ribbons for my craft), came on family vacations, fixed my boo boos when I fell and let me sleep on her couch when I refused to be in the same house as a creepy friend of my mom’s.  She was also the only Grandparent I ever had.  Her  husband died when my mom was only 16, and my other Grandpa visited at most once a year.  My paternal grandmother disowned us when my parents left the Mormon church.  So Grandma Haws was all we had,  but she made up for it.  She came to all my sister’s little league games, and gave me a standing ovation at every school play.
Then one day, maybe eight years ago, she slowly started to fade away.  
In October of 2012, my Grandma suffered acute renal failure.  We rushed her to the hospital. I held her hands while they searched for a vein.  She wouldn’t eat for days.  After her kidneys were up and running they ran a bunch of tests just to see what was wrong.   When she was there the part of me that believes in magic and the Easter Bunny hoped that they would find something “fixable”, that her dementia was just a mistake, a misdiagnosed tumor or a weird virus.  I had vivid dreams about going into the hospital to find her sitting there--my Grandma, the person I always knew, instead of the curled up unresponsive shell she was becoming.   Her fourth day there they did a CT scan, and she had been misdiagnosed.  
Instead of Alzheimer's she had fronto-temporal lobe dementia.  Yes, her mind was withering, but her memory wasn’t fading away, just her interest in it, and us and the world.   She stopped crocheting because she lost interest, not knowledge.  She burned her hair on a curling iron four years ago not because she didn’t know how to use it, but because she didn’t care.  She got lost because it didn’t matter where she drove.  Candles left out, food left to rot.  Clothes left unwashed.  But she never forgot us, because she never will.  Her memory is intact, her will to live, love, laugh and learn is what is dying.
In someways that CT scan was more devastating that moving her to care facility or seeing her house boxed into tupperwares and stacked in a garage.  That image, her brain, was irrefutable proof that Grandma Haws as I had known her, the Grandma Haws I had leaned on, relied on, who had helped me grow into the woman I have become, wasn’t coming back.  It was medical evidence of what we had seen happening for years.  It was external confirmation that my Grandmother had changed so profoundly that nothing could ever turn that clock back.
But I know that a part of her (at least for a little while) still knows when I am there.  She gives me hugs, tells me that she loves me and holds my hands.  If I bring in crocheting she’ll admire what I’ve done.  On good days she’ll laugh, play cards and smile.  On bad days she lays in bed, and I sit next to her and read.  
My grandmother’s brain is going on a sort of permanent vacation.  I can’t go with her, I can’t even call.  But there are so many things I want to tell her, I want to share my life with her, let her see my excitement at getting a first “real” job, or my pride at learning something new.  I want to cry on her shoulder when the world just hurts.  I need her advice on life, love and living.  But she’s leaving. Slowly and surely fading away.

When I was a kid and through college and beyond, whenever I went far enough away for visits to be out of the question, I promised her I’d write, then I’d send postcards, and updates in notes and letters, letting her know how I was, what was happening and reminding her of all the things we’d need to talk about whenever I got back. So that's what I do now. I write letters, some of which I send, some of which I don't. Letter's telling her about what it's like to be me. Letters asking for advice, and a shoulder to lean on. Letters of all the conversations I wish she could have with me---in person. On the phone. Letters of my life, a life I wish that I could share with her more than anyone in the world.

A life she can't care about too much anymore, because an essential part of her has already started to disappear. Bit by bit. Moment by moment. So I write, letters, fold them neatly, put them in envelopes and then into a drawer. Reminders to value the people I love.