From grandmother...

to four-year-old.

“No, let me do that, I can do it myself!” Sounds familiar? Maybe most to the parents of a four-year-old. They think they’ll be old and strong enough to do tasks we are careful to hand to them. They want to help in the kitchen, cooking dinner or cleaning the dishes. They want to pour you a cup of coffee that’s freshly hot or maybe even mop the floor for you. Any parent would consider whether this task is too grand or doable for their children, but what if that same ‘four-year-old’ has celebrated her eightieth birthday and is insecure about anything her brain tells her to do?

         The problem starts…

Having trouble with most everyday tasks is not where the problem starts. Let’s admit it, we’ve all had the days where we struggled more with the washer and dryer than we like to admit. I believe every woman in a pre-menstrual period is seen screaming at the coffee-maker for not doing what it is supposed to do on a morning that full of hurry. The problem starts where the brains begin.

         Frustration

Once you go through life, forgetting almost everything that comes your way, you’ll lie in bed that night, wondering if it has all just been a dream. Trying to remember causes more than a headache and the casual groan becomes part of every sentence. Whining how life has become such an unbearable act of unkindness; how helping is no longer a task on your list, because help is all you need. This stage shows the frustration, the frowning, the ‘why can’t I just remember’, because there is still knowledge in the forgetfulness. Your conscience is aware of the missing like in the grey area, but just can’t figure out how to get the information out of the temporary drawer. Or worse even, the recording system locked inside is out of order, maybe for good. Any healthy brain could wrap its mind around this illness, but hers… I bet she knows, just not to show how.

You won’t even know

The trap that age and time have hatched up for us together is no less shiny than the perceptive that at some point, you are going to be in a bed, with a numb mind, taken care of by two to four hands, and you don’t even know. There is no mirror that can wage the grim perspective that brings to mind. Seeing yourself to the end of your lines; it makes you welcome death before the end begins.

The little things

Passing time now comes with endless buckets of breakfast tea, weather-talk conversations and stories about the war, or the youth after that. It seems the thought and memories as little kids stay with you like yesterday once your brain passed a certain age. The system works with Last-In-First-Out and what you had for lunch, yesterday, makes room for the memory of your first bike. New information doesn’t seem important and even the words that do stick are forgotten once their spoken out loud. At some point, your brain is like the annoying moment on which you’ve deleted everything from your phone, but it still admits being out of capacity. The brain stops processing new and you slowly lose what’s old. The fear it brings should be greater than the knowledge of death. To know you are going to know nothing, is knowing death is here, but you just can’t see it yet.

         Worth it?

After the words come the card-numbers, songs, names of the grand-children, birthdays, keys, coat, shoes. The cleaning the house and cooking the dinner. Eating the food, to drink. And eventually to breathe. Every stage comes with new forms of help and acceptance speeches on how everything is going to be alright, all-well knowing we’re one step closer to the end. More and more medication is needed to keep someone alive and there comes the question; is it all worth it?

In Peace

Most elder people live for their families, the children and grand-children, because who else is going to stuff the kids with sugar on a regular basis, when parents need to provide for ‘the healthy’? But once the spouse has dropped, there is nothing in the life of an old to keep them on track. Most of them will tell you they don’t live their lives for themselves anymore. They are done and have had the best of it. The complete circle of innocence and selflessness is finished. And with that thought, of going back to her other half, she passed away in peace.

Love, Stephanie Garland

I hold a lot of love in my heart for my grandma... I miss her... Yet I know, she is in peace now.