in a constant dream

"Hello? Hi, hi, how are you?"

"Oh, hi Grandmom, I'm good, how are you doing?"

"Well, my chest is hurting, so they're taking me down for x-rays. My stomach's been hurting too, so I don't wanna ride in the car anywhere."

"You don't have to go anywhere if you don't want to. It sounds like they're taking care of you. What have you been up to?"

"Not feeling well. What are you doing?"

"Nothing, just sitting at work"

"Oh, are you busy? They keeping you busy?"

"Yes, ma'am, they sure are."

"Well, we enjoyed our trip up there. It sure was so good to see you."

"You too, Grandmom, I hope you can visit again soon."

"Me too, when I start feeling better. I'll hand you back to your sister now."

"Ok, Grandmom, bye.... Hi, Mom."

Mom likes to call me on her cell phone from the nursing home, the Alzheimer's/Dementia wing specifically, and let me talk to my grandmother, her mom. She knows who I am... most of the time. There are no chest x-rays. Mom was coming to get her to get new glasses today, but she wouldn't leave. Which is fine-- we live in her world after all, and you never could make her do anything she didn't want to, not even before the dementia took hold. She hasn't been up here to see me since last summer, but she always tells me how nice her trip was. Whether she means that trip or one she's more recently taken in her mind, I don't know. And she always thinks Mom and I are sisters, especially on the phone. She knows who I am, she calls me and my mother by name, but the words daughter, sister, mom, have lost their meanings, gotten mixed up somewhere, stuck in a bit of the plaque that's invaded her mind.

Dementia is not something that I can explain or that can be understood by someone who hasn't had direct experience with it. She's there but she's gone. She's lost in her own head. Like someone so long at sea they've forgotten the smell of grass and feeling of dirt under their toes, she exists only in her own boarded-up world now, the rest of us fading in and out like ghosts, haunting her troubled mind. She doesn't know when she's eaten, so she overeats, now almost 300 pounds despite the nursing home's attempts at exercise. She misses her mother, Gram, who died before I was born, and tries to call her all the time, dialing the 30-year-old yet correct numbers into the phone my mother has disconnected by her bed. She told me once she was pregnant and insisted another time that she was only 35. She looked me in the face, called me by name, yet somehow it was ok, it was logical, that she could be that young and still have an adult granddaughter. Time no longer holds any meaning for her. She's drifting back and forth on a raft, engulfed in fog. The first few times you experience this, it's unnerving, that a human mind could deteriorate like that, that she could be perfectly fine by all appearances and yet so wrong inside.

I miss her. I miss her with all my heart. I mourn her loss every time I speak to her. The loss is drawn out over these years, with glimpses of the real her interspersed with rambling, dream-like conversations. I crave those glimpses but they come fewer and farer between now. In a way, I wish death for her. How awful that sounds, I gasp rereading it, and it feels heavy and prickly in my heart. I carry that wish around like a dirty secret, hiding it from the light, hiding it even from myself, hushing it when it surfaces. But she's not there anymore, not really. I wish her mind peace and her body no more pain, and I want some peace for my overworked mother. It leaves me torn, knowing that I only have a few precious moments left with her before she's completely gone, and wanting that sweet release for her and for us.

We live in her world now. You can't fight it. You can't explain rationality to her anymore. You go on a ride with her, living her dreams with her. If she's pregnant, you ask if it's a boy or girl; if she says she's been on vacation, you ask her to describe her adventures. Sometimes it's completely a dream, made real to her by her sticky brain, and sometimes she tells stories from her history, just in the present tense. We've learned from her in this way, stories about her childhood, about my grandfather, things we might never have known otherwise, like eavesdropping on her past. 

Usually when I am someone else to her, I'm her childhood friend, Harriet, and it comforts me to know that she thinks of me as her friend, her dear friend, when I could be a stranger. She still knows she loves me even if she doesn't know my name. Her face lights up when I come in. Mom says that it will be that way til the end, that she will know she loves us even when she knows nothing else, even if she's forgotten her own name. I hope she's right and I hope that's enough, if not for me then for her. My mother is so strong, she handles this all with so much composure. When my grandfather finally succumbed to his cancer, she insisted on taking my grandmother to his funeral, knowing she wouldn't understand but knowing it was the right thing to do, no matter how difficult a task, both physically and emotionally. I wonder if she knows her own strength. I hope I inherited at least some of it, but I also hope I never have to use it.