Naleighna Kai's Literary Cafe Magazine November Edition | Page 36

What
She Remembers
MarZe Scott
The only thing in life that is consistent is change. Some
changes hit you from the blind side and lays on you like a
ton of bricks. March 14, 2017 marked the day that those
very bricks hit me on top of my head and the aftermath
is still something that I deal with on a daily basis.
That cold day in March, her daughter, my mother, pas-
sed away with no warning whatsoever. My mother wasn’t
sick, hadn’t been in the hospital for long stretches or had
even been given a diagnosis of any disease or ailment that
would check her out of here. She simply fell asleep and
didn’t wake up.
My mother had been caring for my grandmother who
was, and on some days still is, completely unaware that
her daughter has passed away.
My grandmother lives with the dastardly “D” word—
Dementia. The Mayo Clinic qualifies Dementia as a
group of symptoms affecting memory, thinking and so-
cial abilities severely enough to interfere with daily func-
tioning. While that might be the clinical definition, what
it means to the family who has to experience the highs
and lows of what it means for a loved one to forget the
most important things that have happened in their lives.
On the day that my mother died, my grandmother
had the presence of mind to open the door for my sister
who had come by to take my mother to an appointment.
She didn’t know the person who was on the other side of
that door. I got called from work to come to my mother’s
house. When I arrived, my grandmother was present in
body, but oblivious to what the commotion was all about.
She was unaware that her only child and caregiver was no
longer alive. To this day she believes that her daughter is
out partying with friends.
36 | NKLC Magazine
Growing up, my grandmother lived a very indepen-
dent life in Nashville, Tennessee. She worked for Vander-
bilt University and saved every penny of her hard-earned
money after bills were paid. However, it was about seven
years ago that my mother noticed that my grandmother
wasn’t “remembering”; not remembering what she had
said just five minutes prior when having a conversation
with someone; not remembering making appointments;
not remembering people she saw often. I became witness
to these occurrences only three years ago when my mother
moved my grandmother from Tennessee to Michigan.
God bless her soul, my mother could have never pre-
pared for the constant repetition of conversations that she
had encountered with my grandmother. My mother never
cared to repeat herself nor did she like to hear the same
information over and over again. So to hear her mother
retell the story of how her own mother died when she was
only a toddler was nerve-wrecking and heart wrenching
every time she told the story. Unfortunate for my mother,
communication of this sort would happen literally ten ti-
mes in a day. Now it’s my turn.
Life has been quite the rollercoaster since taking over as
caretaker for my grandmother. People, in their kindness,
warned me of how taxing it would be living with a loved
one who is coping with memory loss. I could expect my
grandmother to be aggressive and defensive, that it would
be a good idea to prepare myself to hear every manner of
mean and abrasive thing that she could think of. I was told
to look forward to my feelings getting hurt constantly. I
also needed to make sure that she doesn’t wander off from
the house. Knock on wood; life with my grandmother has
been fairly atypical from what I was told to anticipate.