Hey, so here you go, as promised, the essay that I worked on for my essay writing class. I will post another one I am working on this week... as well as trying to get some of my novel written! finally some time to write!
Memories for My Grandma
I am sitting on a plane. It is late, the cabin lights are out, and people are sleeping around me. I am stuck in the middle seat, between a snoring middle-aged businessman in a wrinkled oxford button-up to my right, and my sister sleeping on my left. Her iPod is teetering in her relaxed hand, country music quietly leaking out of her earbuds. Up a few rows ahead of us, my parents are watching a movie on my dad’s netbook. Zombieland. I had loaned it to them before the flight. I look out of the window into a stark blackness, only broken by the occasional flash of the strobing light on the tip of the plane’s wing. Its quiet, and I am left alone to my thoughts.
The stewardess has been working her way down the aisle, pushing the lumbering drink cart. She stops next to my row, and leans in to whisper to me. “Would you like anything to drink?” she asks. “Just a water, please” I reply. She reaches into the cart, pulls out a small water bottle and a small plastic cup, pours half of the bottle into the cup, then hands it to me along with a little white napkin. She then continues on to the next row. What, no peanuts? I take a swig of the water, emptying the cup (it only took one), and then pick up the napkin. The peanuts, I guess, were the latest in a line of cuts that airlines have made recently in order to save money. Remember when it was free to bring a bag on vacation? I don’t any more. Considering the lack of in-flight snack, I have found myself with a little extra time on my hands. The peanut bags given to airline passengers are notoriously difficult to open, and I had expected to waste the next few minutes or so carefully trying to pry the little bag open without spilling its contents all over myself and my neighbors. I instead use this time to carefully examine the American Airlines ad strategically placed on both sides of the napkin. “Turn every day purchases into lifelong memories” the ad reads, begging the passengers to sign up for an American Airlines credit card.
This isn’t the first time I had encountered the word memory tonight. Before leaving our home, my mother had called out to the entire family. “We are going to make some incredible memories this week,” she said, a smile beaming from ear to ear, “This is going to be a trip we will never forget.”. The prospect of something being so permanent is appealing to everyone. Something that will always be there, something you can always fall back upon. The same applies to memories. No matter how bad things may get in the future, you will have these memories forever etched into your brain to relive, like your favorite feel-good movie that always seems to cheer you up. It’s easy, too. All you have to do is make the memories, and they will always be with you, without any effort. I, however, can’t help but be skeptical. I hope that it is simply because of my youth, but I have yet to encounter anything that lasts forever. I can definitively say that memory does not.
It was around two years ago when my grandmother on my father’s side was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I’m not sure exactly when the diagnosis occurred, or when the symptoms began, but that was when my parents sat me down for a talk. “Alex, we have some bad news,” mom said, sitting me down at the dining room table. My dad came in later. A single tear had penetrated his defenses, escaping his eye and running down his cheek. At first, I was afraid that she had passed. I knew something was going on, I was purposefully kept out of the loop. When my parents explained that she had Alzheimer's, I was relieved. The disease was foreign to me, but it was better than death. Less severe. Less concrete. At least she is still alive.
I was wrong. I am no longer sure if Alzheimer’s is better than death. I’m beginning to think it might be worse.
Alzheimer’s is a slow and progressive breakdown of the neural connections in the brain. It begins small, with forgotten chores, or a name of a new acquaintance. Soon motor functions are slowed, and painful attacks of confusion cause arguments. Before anyone knows it, the confusion becomes immobilizing and traumatizing, the names of the closest of family members are lost, and hallucinations are common. The most widely known side effect, however, is the sporadic loss of memory. The confusion attacks are often caused by a sudden realization of a missing memory, and the panic that ensues as one searches for the information one needs. I imagine that it is like being one of the last pages of a long novel and suddenly not knowing what has happened on the pages prior. The panic then comes when you try to look back on the earlier pages only to find they have been ripped out. These events will eventually die down, and the patient becomes docile, lucid, and distant. Eventually, there are no more neurons for the disease to attack, and the brain dies, either killing the patient or leaving them in a coma.
For the next year or so, I only slightly understood what was happening to my Grandma. I was 18 when I found out, but my parents still kept these details from me as if to keep from scaring me. It wasn’t until this last Christmas that I finally saw the real effects of what was happening. That was when I felt the pain for the first time. The pain of watching a loved one slowly drift away.
From the very beginning, something about this year wasn’t the same. My grandmother loved cooking, especially for the holidays. When she was younger, her German mother taught her everything she knew about cooking. Through the years it became a passion for her. Preparing the Christmas feast was one of her absolute favorite things to do. She would always make everything from scratch, down to the ice cream that melted alongside the homemade cherry and pecan pies, often taking the entire Christmas week to prepare. It was always the most delicious meal of the year, and something I looked forward to every Christmas day.
This year, a catering staff prepared the feast. I knew things had to be bad if grandma was forced to miss Christmas dinner.The food was delicious, and extremely lavish (it had no doubt cost my grandfather a fortune) but it just wasn’t the same. It didn’t have enough heart.
. . .
Every kid, while growing up, picks a grandparent they like the best. For me, it was my grandma Boyer. The reasons for this preference began simple; she always gave the coolest gifts. The first gift I ever remember receiving from her was an awesome Batmobile toy, one that went perfectly with the Batman action figures that Santa had gotten me. “This is so cool! How did you know I got these?” I asked her. She looked down at me, smiled, and said “Santa told me to get this for you because you had been so good this year!” At the time, I thought she was so cool, not just because of the awesome new toy I had gotten, but she actually KNEW Santa!
A few years later a similar situation occurred. My parents (yes, the illusion of Santa was spoiled by now) had gotten us a Nintendo 64 gaming system for Christmas. It was the “coolest gift ever” as I said many times that morning, and it started an addiction to video games that lingers on today (okay, it more than just lingers. Its a full blown addiction now). That day, at my grandparent’s house, Grandma pulls me off to the side and hands me a small wrapped box. “Shhh,” she whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell your grandfather.” I open it up to find Goldeneye 007 for the N64. I freaked out, this was the game that I was dying to play. I actually got to be James Bond! “Thank you thank you thank you!” I could hardly contain myself to whispers as I jumped up and down and then leaned in to hug her. Naturally, being the tight-lipped seven-year-old I was, our little secret got out later that night. “It’s too violent for him,” Grandpa said, trying to take it away from me. “Oh shush, Gerry,” Grandma snapped back at him, taking the game and handing it back to me, “does this look like a violent kid to you?” I helped her case by jumping around, non violently, in celebration. Grandpa could no longer deny my cuteness, and let me keep the game.
As I grew up I began to spend more time with Grandma, just the two of us. When I was a little kid, she had taken me to go see Jurassic Park in theaters. At the time, I was totally obsessed with dinosaurs, so this was the coolest thing a grandma could do. I had already seen the movie once, but I still got really scared, right at the beginning of the movie. I pulled on her sleeve, asking “Can we go see the poster outside? Please?” Grandma whispered back “We won’t be able to get back in, Alex,” but that wasn’t enough, I had to go see the poster. So she took me out of the theater, seeing all of 20 seconds of the movie, and we talked about the poster outside before going back home. About 10 years later, a new Jurassic Park movie was released. My dino obsession had come and gone, but I saw this as an opportunity to take Grandma out to make up for an afternoon. I saved up all of my chore money and allowance for weeks in preparation, wanting to make up to grandma for missing the first movie all those years ago. After I paid for dinner at McDonalds and the movie with my own money, my grandma tried to pay me back. I didn’t take it. She smiled at me, gave me a hug, and said “Thanks, Alex. This was just the nicest thing.”
. . .
I was thinking about all of those great times at Christmas this year. It was comforting. I was beginning to get scared, to be honest. Grandma was completely distant the entire night, often just sitting in a chair, rocking back and forth. I came up and sat next to her. She was sitting right next to me, but I still missed her. It felt like she wasn’t there. Finally she turned to me. “Wow, look at you,” she said, “stand up.” I smiled, and stood. “You have grown up so much, gotten so tall! You should stop growing,” she said through a smile. I laughed, she had been saying that to me for years, and yet I never learned. I began to finally feel the connection I had been missing all day. She stood up, and hugged me. “Have I ever told you I’m so proud of you, Bruce. You have become such a great young man. I am just so proud. So proud.” The words hit me like a ton of bricks. Bruce is my dad’s name. She thought I was my dad.
. . .
For the families of Alzheimer’s patients, comfort or pain can come from how you look at things. For instance, at first I was scared that Grandma forgot who I was. It only told me that the end is coming soon, that she was no longer there. My mother got me to look at it differently, however. She and Grandma have become extremely close in recent months, she has been volunteering to help her with daily activities. Before, my mom said she always felt intimidated by her mother-in-law. “She always seemed like she never trusted me. I had gotten the feeling that maybe she didn’t think I was good enough for her youngest son,” she said, “But now, I she trusts me. I can’t explain why, but she has opened up. When she does know she is forgetting something, she will always come to me, if I am around.” She sighed, “I know her better now because she no longer has those barriers up that I always felt were between us.” She then told me to try and look at what she might have been trying to say, and what it could really mean.Now I see it as a great compliment that she confused me for my father, a man whom I admire greatly.
. . .
It has been incredibly painful to watch my grandmother slowly drift away from us. When I say Alzheimer’s is worse than death, I am thinking of this pain. The pain of loved ones who are forced to lay idle while a family member’ sanity slowly deteriorates. The pain of my grandmother, who lives in a constant state of fear and confusion. Memories make people who they are. They are the stored data of your entire life. They tell you where you have been, what you are doing, and who you want to become. To have those memories taken away...I can’t even honestly express how scary of a thought that is to me. But I have learned something important in all of this pain. I have come to truly appreciate the importance of memory in general, and those specific memories I am making during my life. I am no longer going to take memory for granted. I plan to hold on to my memories for as long as I possibly can, and make the most out of the time I have to make them. This has also taught me the importance of shared memories, those moments you spend with those closest to you in your life. I had all but forgotten these memories of moments with my grandma; it wasn’t until Christmas that they popped up in my mind again. I know now, that I need to hold on to them. Hold on to these memories, if not for myself, then for my Grandma. I want to remember who she is, even when she may not be able to.
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