Karen’s Memory Journal, Part 1
If I could recall and communicate each cinematic and riveting detail of the day my grandparents first met with enough clarity to do this moment the justice it deserves, the film would be brushed, grainy…a windswept memory in slow-motion like a body making its way underwater…
In my image, Reba’s softly curling teenage hair loses hold on its perfect coif in the drafty Philadelphia street when Samuel descends from the trolley car and notices her there, next to her girlfriend, the young lady Sam was supposed to meet, who may as well have been invisible. There was another boy interested in Reba, someone her mother liked, whom Reba at first preferred. But not for long…
Of course the moment my grandfather and my grandmother met is the moment that has given rise to every breath and memory of my own life, and I romanticize this meeting…I strain to envision the cut of her skirt, the tilt of her hat…his smartly oiled hair and the dashing, high-waisted fit of his flannel trousers…his hard shoes closing the distance between himself and Reba, called Rae, who was, in his astute recollection, the prettiest girl he had ever seen.
Family pictures attest the validity of this opinion. My grandmother was a true beauty, richly featured, with lush lips, a dewy-skinned, full-cheeked face with a pointed chin and large long-lashed brown eyes. A wide, warm smile. An hourglass figure and a well-cared for wardrobe. All her life Rae dressed herself carefully, in good shoes, with real jewelry. Powder, a fully made-up face, her hair and nails always freshly colored and shaped. Eras gone by during which the au courant fashions masked her beauty with dark-framed cat-eye glasses or overly voluminous hairdos couldn’t change, diminish it, or take it away…and decades later as Rae sits in her wheelchair in the nursing facility where she has resided for the past year, she may be the only resident to claim the frequent and consistent compliment of family, regular visitors, staff, and strangers alike: “isn’t she still so beautiful.”
And she is. At 87, Rae’s skin remains soft and pliant, with surprisingly few lines. Her mouth retains its beautiful bow shape and naturally rosy hue. And her hair, finally allowed to go white after decades of salon-coloring, is snowy and lovely. My grandfather, Sam, at 91, still sees how beautiful she is. Remembers the girl she was with a respectful sense of awe at the passage of time…at the sheer number of years of togetherness…and at the way time has converted his beautiful young wife from a passionate cook and devoted mother to a confused old woman with paranoid fantasies that the nurses are stealing her clothes…and worse…
And yet Sam is a mind-blower. Sharp as a tack, my 91 year old grandfather recently asked my brother for his old college textbooks on the conflicts of the Middle East. Read his way through each and every one and discussed his thoughts and opinions. He stays current on the news, reads whatever novels my mother and I share, avails himself of the local library, and enjoys debating world events and politics with anybody who dares. Physically, he has his challenges. Once in a while, he’ll tell the same story twice, though I must note that this is usual for people of my own relatively young age of nearly 37. Sam has always had a vital mind…
Which makes the contrast between his mental faculties and Rae’s all the more painful. Not to mention the loss of companionship and their shared love of music, food, their sense of home. The history of their lives together, minutely recorded in my grandfather’s mind, now seems nebulous as reflected by my grandmother. On her good days she knows herself, knows the name of my six year old son. Other days she only vaguely recognizes her own daughter, my mother. And asks her whose children my brother and I are…
The progress of my grandmother’s degeneration of memory freezes me, emotionally, in my tracks. She was the warmest person in my memories of my upbringing…the hours I spent cooking and baking and just being together with her in her kitchen are some of the most comforting recollections I own, and it hurts to feel that the person who loved to grab my face and kiss all over it, giggling at how adorable she found me is no longer there. My grandmother was the one person who showed me that I was capable of inspiring joy by simple virtue of my own innocent existence….
And yet there she still is, in moments…with offers of food…the way she passes a dish of olives down the table knowing that I love them just as much as she does…the way she responds to the hugs and kisses of her grandchildren, with as much genuine loving gratitude as ever…
Most of all, what fascinates me about my grandmother, compromised as she is, is this: at any family occasion, there she sits, so changed from the bustling, talkative, able woman we used to know. Wheelchair-bound. Mostly silent, if it’s not one of her better days. This we have come to expect…but whether it’s a lucid day or not, I have come to rely on this one surprising thing from Rae: the way her eyes follow the activities of my little boy like a hawk. The way she fastens on his every antic, making sure he doesn’t jump too high, land wrong, risk himself. Always making sure, despite her lack of orientation-times-three, despite the almost total loss of hearing, loss of home…despite everything…that any child in her line of sight is well taken care of. The mother in her is fixed…active…still and always ruling her most basic elemental mind…
And so I watch her, as carefully as she watches him, equally charmed…just as riveted… We have all lost so much of her…she is only sometimes aware of how much of herself has gone. What amazes me is that what remains of my grandmother is the deeply rooted core of maternal instinct. That careful, caring watchfulness. Stripped of memory and mobility, yet still vitally, utterly capable of love.
And I ask myself, despite the obvious answers to the contrary: what else matters?