Happy grandmas

My grandmother lost her faculties of memory, reason, and recognition, over a long slow decade long slide of Alzheimer's. She was, for the most part, cheerfully demented. Towards the end, in the year or two before she lost the power of speech, her disease was tinged with bouts of panic and worry, about losing the baby or having friends over for dinner and not having anything to serve them. But for many years, when I would visit, long after she recognized me as a continuous being from previous visits let alone as her grandchild, she was, for many years of that slide, happy that this young stranger had come to chat with her. Before that, when it wasn't exactly obvious she couldn't track details of the conversation, she quite readily covered up for it by asking for little reminders, by changing the subject, by introducing her own observations or anecdotes, sometimes related to the topic at hand, sometimes not. Her short term memory faded far sooner than her long term, and conversations, by necessity, often centered around her recalling times past, as far back as her childhood.

I imagine her world, through this last stage of her life, as a mansion with the lights dimming. To someone else, this might have been frightening, a time for shadows to flicker to life malevolently stealing her memories, her intellect, but to her I believe it was a peaceful evening's twilight. She had a lifetime of training of forcing herself into social situations where she was not entirely comfortable and making herself pleasant and witty, and, the family's theory goes, that training, that disposition, when faced with a loss of memory, reacted in kind, assuming that the people around her meant well, that even if she didn't know how it was happening, her household was being maintained and all was going just fine.

I don't know enough about her, life and I can't recall her before her disease clearly enough, to say how accurate that assessment of her personality and her place in society really is. Nor do I know enough about Alzheimer's to know if personality and social and intellectual training early in life has an effect on the course of the disease, or if my linking of her self as and adult and her self in second childhood is anything less than wishful thinking. But in my magical thinking, I take from the story of the end of her life that I should train myself to see the best in the world around me. That I should force myself to rise above the vast irrational fears that are particularly incumbent on a parent. That I should decide to smile. That I should seek out kind and wise people in my life and look to them for guidance and solace, and avoid those who make me nervous, or angry, or frustrated.

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: crepes!
lunch: crepes!
dinner: quiche! and thai chicken soup, sort of