So, it wouldn't be me if I didn't go weeks without posting, right? Well, this was something I wrote on 1/7 of this year and never got around to posting it. In truth, when I wrote it, I didn't plan on posting it at all because it's not something I would normally share with the threes of people who actually read my blog (threes? okay, so maybe ones). Anyway, here it is.
New year, new journal. That’s how it goes right? Not for me. For some reason, even though I am supposed to be this huge reading/writing nerd, I have never been one to write in journals. My past experiences with journals have been to start one, write for a few days, stop for a few weeks, pick it up again and vow to do better, but in the end, I never do. I doubt it’s a habit that’s going to be hard to break.
Today, I realized I need to break that habit.
My mom called me at work, leaving one of her notorious the world-is-ending voicemails. In my head, I was thinking that it was either another fight with my brother or something was wrong with my grandma. My grandma has been battling—wait, ignoring—her Alzheimer’s for the past few years and lately it has been getting significantly worse. This past Christmas, she did not show up to our family get-together because of what my family called “the incident”. After asking what they meant by “the incident”, they described that my mom had woken up to a phone call from my grandmother at 2 am trying to call 911, but instead she called my house. Eventually, my mom convinced my grandmother to hand the phone off to my grandfather who woke up to find that every window and door had been opened by my grandmother—in December. Thankfully, I’m from a super small town in Iowa where nothing happens. That, and she didn’t try to leave the house.
Christmas is nowhere near the first time my grandmother has done something strange because of her Alzheimer’s. On Thanksgiving, she grabbed my cousin’s belly, who had been pregnant for probably 6-7 months by then, and asked her when that happened. She then turned to a mirror and began rambling about the nice woman who was waving back. My grandma talking to the nice woman in the mirror is something that has been happening ever since.
Pretty much everyone in the family has tried to get my grandma to do something about her illness. They have tried to get her to take meds by being honest and talking to her and have even tried tricking her into taking the meds. Only once have they succeeded in getting her to take her meds, but that lasted only a few days.
Anyway, the reason my mom called me today was to tell me that her, my aunt, my uncle, and my grandpa put my grandma in a nursing home earlier. My grandpa finally realized how serious my grandmother’s condition was when he woke up to her taking a knife to the kitchen floor. They also discovered that when she would lock herself in the bathroom for hours at a time she was doing the same thing to the floor in there. I can’t imagine what it would be like to wake up in the middle of the night to someone you have been married to for so many years cutting up a kitchen floor and that person not having any notion of why this not “normal” behavior. Just seeing that and wanting to do something to help, but not really being able to must have torn my grandpa apart. Maybe that’s why he ultimately decided to put her in a nursing home—that’s really the only way he can help her.
My mom said the hardest part of the entire situation was the look my grandmother gave them when they brought her there—a mixture of hurt, anger, and probably disbelief. Just imagining that look is what almost brings me to tears.
One of the saddest parts about this entire situation is that my grandmother is in perfect physical health for a woman her age. Until recently, when my grandpa had to start monitoring her more often then he used to, she had always been active woman. She walked every day, ate healthy, and took really good care of herself. She was probably in better shape then I am. But now with this illness, it doesn’t really seem to matter how physically fit she is, her mind is what is hurting her.
All of this, and the possibility that I might someday be in the same situation, is what brings me to my computer. I don’t want to live my life forgetting that a family member is pregnant or forgetting what I look like. I can’t live like that. I want to remember as much as possible. If it takes me sitting at my computer for an hour each day to record, that’s what I have to do. And so…here I go.
**Update: Since I wrote this at the beginning of January, my grandmother has been taken out of the nursing home. The nurses that were taking care of her decided that her wandering around was not ideal and gave her this alarm that she had to sit on and every time she would try and get up to move around, it would go off. It got to the point that my grandfather could not see her miserable like this and brought her home.
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