the memory unit 2

Back in Carlsbad again to see my sister and my grandmother. I've been getting myself psyched up to head over to the nursing home. The G-mom (as we call her) has been in for 4 months now, and not getting many visits from the outside world. Since I live several hours away, I'm one of these infrequent visitors. I hope her natural buoyancy is holding. I hope her health hasn't declined. I hope she's not ready to stop recognizing people just yet.

She recognizes me, no hesitation. Exclaims over the flowers I brought her. And then starts to ask me who all these other people in the room are. We're in the common dining area and dinner's coming up, so they're wheeling people in. "Sorry, I don't know any of these people," I tell her. "I don't know 'em either," she replies. I'm slowly realizing that, of the maybe a dozen residents in the unit on my last visit in July, only one besides my grandmother seems to be the same. The implications of this are almost too much to bear. But later, my sister and I will remark on another unsettling part of this change: while I guess the staff can't help this situation, they also can't expect the clarity of people whose memories are eroding to be helped much by a constantly changing set of faces and names. Wow.

The other familiar face here is the tall man who doesn't talk much. Today I learn that his name is George. He's parked in the corner, behind where we sit. After a while, he breaks his silence with a stream of words that is equal parts coherent and otherwise. "What's he saying?" my grandmother asks, just a bit irritably. "I don't know," I tell her. It sounds, at one point, like he's deep in the memory of building fence with a crew, out in the back forty. Her natural kindness and sympathy soon overcomes her frustration at his rambling. She looks over her shoulder at him and says, reassuringly, "I know what you mean!" A moment later, when he rejoins his invisible dialogue, she raises her voice a little more. "Oh, is that so!" she calls out, a bit too loudly. Then she turns back to me, smiling with the perfect gleefully-unrepentant-guilty-child expression. To my astonishment, she confides, "That oughta shut him up for a while!". That's what I get for making an angel of her...

My sister later confirms: "Yeah, I think those two have a unique sort of friendship." Tells me about another visit where George wanted to talk, and my grandmother was having trouble conversing over his rising and falling voice. How she loudly declared, "I don't like you! I wish you would just be quiet!" With a bit of that uncensored candor that is old age's beautiful and heart-wrenching privilege. There was a silence - a long one, actually - as he paused, looked her way, and began to move his wheelchair in their direction. It took him 4 or 5 careful minutes to cross the room and pull up even with the two of them. Then he stopped moving, and without looking up said, "But I like you..."

My grandmother agreed quickly that she liked him fine, as well, and just wanted to talk with her granddaughter a minute. The unconditionality necessary to their shared state returning them, perhaps, to the present moment. They're the only two survivors of the Memory Unit. They could reminisce like old war veterans do. I think they must know a final, elemental, human acceptance that most of us spend our lives learning -- or not learning -- only to be met by irrevocably, at the end of all our preferences and attachments. But anyway. I think my grandmother was cultivating this sort of acceptance long before she was required to. I watched her, in younger years, give it generously to many people, a standout in her small conservative town. And it sustains her now. "It's what's kept her going, all these years", my sister sums up later. "She loves people and she's never stopped wanting to show them kindness." If there's anything I know of my grandmother, throughout my own acquaintance with her, this is definitely it. Her love of life, of experiences, and most of all of people. That and her brilliant, distance-melting candor. Two things in which I hope to follow her well, should I have the privilege of living 87 years of life.