Ten years later

This is my Granny. The same one behind all of this. The one that raised me. Loving person, great storyteller, HUGE Michael Jordan fan. She called him “slickhead” and would YELL at the TV shouting “WOO HOO!” when he had the ball and if a team mate of Jordan’s had the ball and missed his shot, she said “he must not even be trying.” She was quite the character.

She’d sit in the living room often during the afternoon waiting for the mail man to come, and if he/she were late, they would catch Hell for it. Gems like “the confound mail man didn’t come till 2:30 today! 2:30!! Have you ever seen anything like it? He must be new” would pour out of her like maple syrup and I smiled and laughed every time.

Ten years go this month, my family and I went through the wildest and saddest thing we had ever dealt with. My Granny left the house one morning shortly after my mom had left for work, and went to “pick the baby up from school.” Now, let me break this down a bit further. It is November, my granny is walking down the street in her pajamas and robe, headed to the school (where I attended K-4) to pick up who? The baby. Guess who the baby is. ME.

For a while leading up to this particular November morning, we had been observing over time that Granny was having these hallucinations about me being a baby and that she would ask my mom when she came home from work what she did “with the baby.” Several times my Mom would call me at work, and ask me to call Granny and talk to her and tell her that I am NOT a baby anymore and try to help her “snap out of it” by realizing that she had a weird dream or hallucination. Well, this infuriated Granny, and all kinds of arguments would ensue because to her, these “visions” etc. were as real as the nose on her face, and we could not tell her otherwise. One of the other frequent hallucinations was that she saw people breaking into the garage and stealing stuff. So, for a while there, as a family, we were kind of freaked out. It was taking a hard toll on my Mom because she still lived in the house with her and had to deal with it in person whereas me and my brother were out of the house and on our own. Separately of course.

So, the morning of Granny’s little stroll down Broadmoor Drive was quite the event, and the result of that was her being picked up by the police, and then taken to the hospital for observation. She was placed in the Memory Disorder Clinic at Centennial Medical Center, where she began to undergo all kinds of tests to try to determine what was going on in her brain. They quickly learned that she was quite fiesty and threatened the staff more than once who were trying to help her during one of her hallucinations. The first time I went to see her in the hospital, I remember peeking into her room after being briefed by my mom as to what had happened that day. She was peacefully sleeping, and I was relieved that she was not hurt. However, the next day when I went to see her she was out in the “general population” of other patients in that area and sadly she was strapped into a wheel chair because before I got there she had really gotten into it with a nurse and they had to strap her down.

My visit with her was bizarre, and so sad as I sat there next to her trying to keep her calm and talk about silly stuff to lighten the mood some, all the while staring at her strapped into a wheelchair. When I left and was talking to one of the doctor’s while peeking through the glass pane on the door to that room, tears just started rolling down my face as he told me that she had Dementia and that most likely, this was going to lead to Alzheimer’s Disease. My only relief out of all this was that it explained what was behind all those hallucinations that she was having, and that she was not crazy. But the sadness overwhelmed the relief quickly, as I realized that this Thanksgiving would be the first ever that I would spend without my Granny due to her being hospitalized, and I also knew that Thanksgiving as I knew it (with her) would never be the same again, and I just stood there looking at her in that wheelchair with a broken heart.

My family and I went to Cracker Barrel a few days later for Thanksgiving dinner since my Mom was in no shape physically, mentally or emotionally to want to “do Thanksgiving” by cooking. It was the first time we had ever gone out to eat on that most celebrated holiday, and it was weird and sad. Granny remained at the Memory Disorder Clinic for a several more weeks, even spending Christmas there, which was more sad and bizarre than Thanksgiving was. Shortly after Christmas, she was moved to a nursing home, and she spent her last 14 months of life there.

Ten years later, I am thinking a lot about that crazy time for our family, and the beginning of the end for Granny. Perhaps it is because this year Kristi and I will have another sort of unusual Thanksgiving as we travel to see a friend in Atlanta, who is without family and friends this week due to being “at work,” and away from those she loves. Even though my family is here, I think it is more important to be family for a friend this time, rather than to see family that is always here.

Ten years later I still miss my Granny, especially around Thanksgiving, because it is so easy to recall all of this stuff in my mind each year. I get sad as I think about what her life was like and the struggle she must have been going through internally during all of that. I get sad because I can’t drive over to the house and hang out with her and listen to her get wound up about the black birds eating all the food she put out for the robins, and how she wanted to poison all the black birds. Or listen to her go off about the leaves blowing into her yard from the next door neighbor’s yard and the irritation at that neighbor because she wouldn’t come over and rake all of them up.

I also smile though too when I think of her, because she was so dear and even though the Dementia and Alzheimer’s was the beginning of the end of her, in the grand eternal scheme of things, the end was really just the beginning, and her mind is perfect now. Dementia and Alzheimer’s won the battle but lost the war, and I cannot wait to see her one day and catch up. Then I can tell her about how late OUR mailman is sometimes.