just words

A couple of months ago, I visited my grandma up in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. Beautiful place. It was her birthday, she was turning eighty-five, or eighty-six, or ninety, it’s hard to tell with her, considering she changes the number up on you every time you ask, and at first I thought it was because she was hiding her age, which I’m sure was the case originally, but that’s not the case now, because she’s not hiding anything anymore, she just doesn't remember.

She doesn’t remember much, actually. 

I mean, her general long-term memory is pretty good, she remembers who I am, how I used to play with the kids in her neighborhood during the summers, and how we used to go swimming every night in the neighborhood pool, and how she’d take me to the playground sometimes, and how I got in trouble that one time for throwing stuff at cars from behind the big hill, and how, between the ages of like seven to ten, I used to fall asleep in her bed, watching television, until eventually she said I tossed and turned too much in my sleep, so she bought me a little mattress and put it on the floor by the bed, and when I got real sleepy, she’d nudge me onto that little floor mattress and tuck me in with a blanket she had sewn herself, and I’d wake up every morning to a cup of chocolate milk, which she always said was too fattening, but she made it for me anyway because I was her favorite grandkid, and she let me know it all the time.

She remembers all this stuff, but she doesn’t remember the specifics. She doesn’t remember the names of those neighborhood friends I used to play with, and she doesn’t remember that it was MacGyver that we used to fall asleep to, and she doesn’t remember how the blanket was actually a Superman blanket, and she doesn’t remember that the cup she always poured my chocolate milk into was a Power Rangers cup, and that it had pictures of the White Ranger all over it, because he was my favorite Power Ranger. She knew that back then, but now she doesn’t, now she doesn’t know who my favorite Power Ranger is, because she just doesn't remember.

During the birthday party, when we were all out there on the back porch, everyone drinking and smoking and laughing and having a merry time, she was just sitting in her little chair, quiet as a mouse. She doesn’t talk much anymore, and when she does, my aunt, who lives with her, as her caretaker pretty much, usually makes some comment about how Grandma’s memory isn't what it used to be, and how she’s taking all sorts of brain pills, doing all sorts of experimental treatments to improve her memory, and when I look at her, my grandma, I see confusion in her eyes, or maybe fear. I see a woman who is losing her self-awareness but has just enough left to know that she is losing her self-awareness, and I think it must be terrifying for her, probably worse than simply losing it altogether, because at least then she wouldn’t feel it happening in real time. It frightens me, it really does. I see her sitting there, blank almost, laughing when she thinks she needs to laugh and smiling when she thinks she needs to smile, but never saying a word because, I think, she doesn't want to make a fool of herself, because she knows, she knows what’s going on inside, she knows that stuff is seeping out of her head and never coming back. She knows that, despite decades of pill regimens and exercise, her body is turning against her, slowly erasing her personality, her loves and hates, all her little quirks, all of it seeping out, never coming back.

I start to wonder, if you forget everything, and then everyone forgets about you, does that mean you just stop existing? Does the physical body even matter at that point? Do you just pop out of existence? In hundreds of years, when all is said and done, and your kids and grandkids and great-grandkids have all forgotten you, or they remember some mythological version of you that’s nothing like the person you actually were, does your existence then simply boil down to a tree falling in the woods when no one is around?

So, back there on that porch, solemn and saturnine, I started asking her a bunch of stuff, “Do you remember this, do you remember that,” but she couldn’t answer any of my questions, and I started to feel a little bad, like I was just highlighting to her how she’s fading away, and then I started to feel like an insensitive asshole, almost, like I was making things worse, so, while everyone was back there, partying for my grandma’s eighty-ninth birthday, but basically partying without her, because she was just sitting there, blank, I took her by the hand and I said, “C’mon, let’s go.” And she said, “Where are we going?” And I said, “To where we used to go.”

Then, hand in hand, we walked to the clubhouse, just behind her house, with the old pool we used to swim in, and instead of asking her, “Do you remember this?” I told her. I told her, “We used to swim here at night, even though the gate was locked, and the neighbors would complain.” And then I pointed out my friend’s house, just beyond the clubhouse, “That’s Miles’ house right there, we used to go there all the time, they had two boxers, but you never liked them much because they barked at night.” And then I took her to the playground just behind the clubhouse, and I said, “This is where you would watch me swing and go down the slide, and sometimes you would even go down with me.” And then I led her up the playground steps and we both slid down the biggest slide, one after another. And then we swung on the swingset, side by side, until the sky was all purple and orange. Then we went back to her house, but instead of going to the back porch, where the party was going on, I took her into her bedroom, the same one she’s had for years, with the same bed I used to sleep in, only now with a big Roku smart TV mounted on the wall, and we lay down on the bed together, side by side, then I put on MacGyver, and that incredible theme song went off, and we just lay there for a while, heads on our big pillows, watching MacGyver weld a nail to a broken spark plug using jumper cables and a battery.

Then, after a few minutes of just lying there, watching MacGyver, my grandma said three words, she said, 

“I remember this.”