the memory unit

In Carlsbad this week, I went to see my grandmother at the nursing home. It was the first time. She's only been there a month. My sister's just been released - quite suddenly, after a decline in my grandmother's health - from over 3 years' service as her full-time caregiver. And when I say, "full-time", I mean that. Not "40 hours a week". Not 80. All of them. Your waking, your sleep, your relaxation, your every process is subject to the interruption of some need or some crisis. I don't know if anybody can comprehend the level of commitment that live-in caregiving requires. Maybe parents can. But kids progress in their understanding. They learn to hold their own, give their parents space now and then, make a few decisions for themselves. Adults with dementia are moving on the opposite trajectory. There is, simply and literally, no end to their needs. As long as their life continues.

It's a small home, one of the least institutional I've been in. The staff seem friendly. There are plenty of windows. The residents are interacting with each other -- surprisingly so. When I used to deliver drugs (for a pharmacy), my route took me into nursing homes full of such sad, wandering souls, lost in irretrievable isolation. It was a deep relief not to see much of that here.

We always joke about my grandmother being the one we get our psychic abilities from. She's proved her powers on more than one startling occasion. And yesterday she didn't let me down. I hadn't seen her in several months, and she wouldn't have been told I was coming. But as the attendant rolls her wheelchair in, she stretches out a hand, pointing, and her face lights up in a smile. "There she is!" she calls out, in the same voice that would say, "Didn't I tell you so?"

I spend about an hour pushing her around her small ward (it's called "The Memory Unit", sounding like a term out of sci-fi, or supercomputing). Several other residents stop to talk with us. The common theme of conversation seems to be "as soon we get out of here". Almost as if they were cheerful prison inmates. Nobody appears to be upset about the time they're doing, only mildly impatient to get back to their ordinary lives and all the daily tasks they had left undone. A woman with wild bleached-blonde hair and startling black eye makeup confides to me, "This week just isn't my week. But as soon as I get outta here and get some stuff organized, I'll be doing better."

There is only one man in the Memory Unit. I had been told that he doesn't speak. My grandmother - always the flirt, but also the kind heart - is concerned about him. She asks me to wheel her over next to his chair. He'd be strong and tall - over six feet - if he could stand. But he sits slumped, staring through thick glasses at a point invisible to everyone else. My grandmother reaches out silently, and takes his hand. He glances sidelong, looks as if he's going to pull away, then relaxes. "Do you have what you need?" she asks, softly. He doesn't reply. So we move on. A few minutes later we're back in the room. "Are you doing alright?" she asks again. Several seconds elapse. Then he looks up, almost but not quite meeting our eyes. In a cautious, monotone voice, he offers, "I don't hurt too bad..."

My grandmother has a new roommate as of this week, Mrs. Bustamante. One look at her and I am convinced that she was once a silent movie star. Either that or an opera singer. She is thin, dresses all in black, and her large, deep black eyes are uncovered by glasses. Black eyeliner, high cheekbones, deep red lipstick, and thick wavy hair dyed black complete the glamour. She casts a shadow of someone who was surely dramatic, gorgeous, in her youth. Her daughter is visiting today, and exchanges some friendly words with me, around the curtain that separates the halves of their room. I am sitting on my grandmother's bed a bit later, when Mrs. Bustamante comes walking slowly around the curtain. She comes straight up to me, leans over, puts her arms around my neck, and says, "I love you, mi'ja. You are beautiful!" She goes to my grandmother, gives her a hug, tells her she loves her too. Then she disappears quietly back around the curtain.

How do we calculate a memory unit? There must be thousands of them, floating everywhere in this contained space. One word, one gesture, one look? The single shard of a moment it takes for a beam of light, the sound of a voice, a touch of a hand, to imprint itself forever on the senses? Would it be the amount of information that gives an occurrence meaning? Or only as much as it takes to ignite mystery, sense, engagement with all that is? One thing I'm convinced of, from time around my grandmother: no memory is ever lost. I think every last unit of it stays humming and glimmering in the web of interconnection. It's only the search engine that malfunctions. The filing system that gets disordered. But it's all there. And there are moments when the mystery finds ways to bring the strangest and most lovely slivers and threads of it singing to the surface, even in the most weary or embattled or bewildered of minds.

I'm worried that leaving will be difficult. But when I tell my grandmother I'll be back tomorrow, she accepts this cheerfully enough. As I walk toward the door the old man looks up. "Take it easy!" he calls out. As if we'd been in friendly conversation all along. Or maybe we had, and I'm the one who doesn't remember.