Age

jasonbenedict.com

I do not visit my grandmother often, so when I do visit her, it is an Experience.

My grandmother, Grandma Hunin, lives in a retirement home called Cathedral Village. She suffers from Alzheimer's and the last time I visited her she would begin crying at seemingly random times. I remember being incredibly impressed with how well my mother coped with seeing her own mother so unable to communicate, so frustrated with her own memory loss, so emotional and helpless. I cried during that visit, remembering the strong woman that my grandmother is but not seeing that strength when I looked at her. She was only using one word responses at that time, a lot of "Yeah".

I was nervous about this trip, two years after I had last seen Hunin. She has progressed to the point that she does not speak really, and her communication is limited. But through my experience during this visit, I would say that there is a strange arch of development in this disease. The last time I was here, I was never really sure whether or not Hunin recognized me. This time, even though she is more progressed in her disease, I felt that maybe she did recognize me. Maybe her recognition is now on a different level; maybe after not remembering for so long she has come to a point where any glimmer of recognition or sense of memory has become strong enough to trust. If I could see the way she works through it, maybe it would be something like: "I recognize that there is a blonde woman smiling at me. I remember that smiling like that means that we are close. I will smile back." And she shows me as well in the way that she grips and squeezes my hand as I sit near her on the bed, as she kisses my cheek while I kiss hers, that there is some connection there. Maybe there is memory in the blood, and on the path to mental oblivion there is a point in our threshold where we let go of our mental ability to know and rely on our physical sense of recognition.

Either way, I felt the strength of my grandmother again as she met her great-grandson Mason for the first time, as she stared at me for a length that proved lack of self-consciousness. As my family processed the visit together, we mentioned the similarities between infants and Alzheimer's patients. Both in new territory, unable to fully competently communicate, and distressed at these facts. The end seems like it's a little like the beginning.