My grandmother, Doris, passed away this morning. She was 96.
She had been ill for several years, had suffered angina, and two strokes related to the Alzheimer’s that ultimately ended her life. I had little contact with her in the last three years of her life, despite the fact that she was in a care home just a mile from my parents’ house in New Milton. I found it hard to visit as her condition deteriorated, but justified this with the notion that ‘she’ had effectively vacated her physical body a long time ago. Alzheimer’s strikes me as a cruel condition, creating in the sufferer a complete breakdown in the veracity of one’s own memory. Then, it replaces key memories – the house you grew up in, your wedding day - with fabrications. Next, Alzheimer’s starts to alter your perception of the present, ‘real’ world such that you can’t even believe or understand what you’re hearing. Voices, ‘strangers’ in your own house, and all the while, the true memories are being erased.
After losing your ability to perceive time, language and any sense of your location in the wider world, Alzheimer’s plays it’s cruellest trick: sufferers forget that they’ve forgotten anything, and appear to exist in a heavily medicated dream-state, where one second lasts years, years last minutes, hours are infinite and everything’s in the wrong order. The dissociative, disorientating combination of all these factors would be overwhelming to a young, agile mind, but it generally afflicts the elderly. How must it feel to realise that your mind is coming apart at the seams? Alzheimer’s steals experiences away from those who experienced them, and then those who have been robbed no longer realise that any theft has occurred.
Thankfully, I have some amazing memories of my Grandma, which I’ll be forming into a eulogy at a later date some time next week. She was a pretty amazing person before her condition started to take effect. She was an amazing cook, a crossword-solver extraordinaire, a proud and fervent supporter of her family, and had a toughness and flint in her gaze that spoke, I always thought, of her Welsh ancestry. She could be argumentative and forthright – a trait that all the women in my family share, but this was driven not by malice or the simple love of an ‘exchange of views’, but by love; by wanting what was best; by an innate sense of what was right. I hope that some of that has carried on percolating down through the generations, and will continue to do so.
Now that she’s gone, and relations with my father are still very much non grata, I consider myself orphaned, remarkably, at 35. ‘The last of the Joneses’ (which is nearly true, of course, but not quite). I am not literally alone. I have the nucleus of a family – my step-father will be as great a source of strength in the next few weeks as I no doubt was to him when my mother – the woman he had expected to die in the arms of, no doubt – passed away three years ago. Even as a youngster, I realised and accepted that I might see a day when my mother and grandparents would have passed on – that I would be living in a ‘post-Mum’ universe – but to have lost a sister, mother, grandfather and now grandmother at this point in my life does feel unfair. Christmas at Tam’s family home brought home to me just how many people I no longer have to call my own.
Of course, after the formalities are completed, the funeral over, and our lives resume, there are positives to be drawn from the midst of all this loss. My Grandmother is, I can virtually guarantee it, in a better place than she was this time yesterday. They call it ‘being at peace’, and the deaths I’ve had to witness or share with friends and colleagues certainly fit that description.
A friend of my sister’s lost her parents when she was in her early twenties, and I think her personality altered somewhat afterwards. I remember feeling the deepest sympathy for her, being scarcely able to comprehend how that much loneliness would feel. I feel it too, sometimes, and in my case it takes the form of a howling emptiness in the quiet times of the day, and a heightened significance at family occasions or on anniversaries. It’s literally like a dull ache in the heart, which if pursued and brought into the open of conscious consideration, leads to tears. Even more dispiritingly, it seems to get worse as the years go by. The idea that this howl might live inside me for the rest of my life is profoundly sad, and very real. This, of course, is why people have children.
I look forward to introducing mine to their grandmother, and telling them what a great person my grandmother was.
