A Five-year-old Teaches a Lesson in Grace
On the night the author loses patience with her mother and her dementia, a granddaughter’s love unites them all
It’s eight o’clock on a cold spring night. Our apartment has been hit by a cyclone—the handiwork of a young, energetic child. Every bit of furniture is draped with paper chains, scissors and Scotch tape, modeling clay, piles of acorns, and party favors.
I’m so tired tonight. I’ve been on crutches for seven weeks, recovering from hip surgery, and I’m trying fruitlessly to clean up. The phone rings—for the sixth time in less than an hour. We know who it is. When my mother was 68, a hemorrhagic stroke claimed her brain, but not her life. She awoke from a coma severely damaged; the bleed instantly razed the landscape of her mind. Dementia soon built a Gothic fun house of distortions where coherent architecture had once stood. She has been manacled inside
for a decade, with little to do but experience psychic distress.
She is dogged by paranoia—she thinks she has been kicked out of her assisted living facility (not true), she thinks her daughters have not visited in months (it has been a few days), she thinks that her friend Jimmy never wants to see her again (he calls and visits weekly).
Each time she calls, I play a game with myself called “How Good a Person Can I Be?” I’ve won five rounds of the game tonight; I am due for a fall.
She has no idea that she has repeated the things she is about to say a million times today and a million times yesterday. She has no idea that I had surgery, nor can she recall her own granddaughter’s name. She is unaware of most of the past, and she drifts in the present. She is lonely.
I hurl my anger at the easiest target: my mother, the very victim of this chance horror.
“MOM!” I yell. “YOU ARE NOT BEING REMOVED FROM YOUR HOME! AND WE VISITED TWO DAYS AGO!” (Maybe it was four days, but she won’t remember anyway.) “Mom, you have to believe me, and if you don’t, I cannot talk anymore! Everything is fine!” Silence. Then:
“I was only calling to say hi.”
I feel the dagger of passive aggression, which is the only working weapon in her mental arsenal. My mother continues, having already forgotten that I yelled. (Sometimes she does remember; tonight I luck out.)
“But I’m also frantic about something; do you have a minute?”
“No, Mom, I don’t. I can’t again with this!”
“Why are you yelling?”
I’m yelling because you aren’t my mother; you are a poorly rendered stand-in who cannot help me care for my child, or be a grandmother, or even remember to ask me about my day. I’m yelling because I have talked you off this ledge five times tonight, and I’m yelling because you remind me of everything I fear: aging, sickness, fragility, bad luck, loss, impermanence ... You name it—if it’s scary, you remind me of it!
I flop on the couch, aware of all my daughter is witnessing. She hears me reprimand my mother, lose my patience, announce that someone I love is an imposition. I have not only failed at being a Good Person; I have failed at being a Good Example to My Daughter.
I stew on the couch, defeated. “Can I talk to Grandma Ellie?” My five-year-old reaches for the phone.
Wordlessly, I hand it over.
“Hi, Grandma!”
I hear my mother exclaim through the receiver.
“Sweetheart! How are you? Did you go to school today?”
What witchcraft is this? All she said was “Hi, Grandma,” and my mother sounds like a person fully alert to the heartbeat of a normal day.
“Yes, Grandma, and today was share day, and I brought my Wonder Woman bracelets.”
“Can you put it on speaker?” I whisper to my daughter.
She obliges, and out of the phone comes a waterfall of good cheer. My mother tells her how much she loves her and how lovely her voice sounds.
Then: “I hope I’ll see you soon?” My mother makes her plea for a
“GRANDMA, WE ARE TAKING YOU TO THE CAROUSEL THIS WEEKEND.”