The other day my grandmother went to the hospital to have a pacemaker put in. Apparently she had some kind of heart trouble and needed the pacemaker. I’m still not exactly sure what was wrong, or what happened (my family doesn’t communicate well), but she’s doing okay now.
My grandmother has been having memory problems that resemble Alzheimer’s Disease for the past few years, and while it was once quite fun to sit and talk to her, it’s now become awkward.
When I talk to her now, I feel like I should treat her as a normal person. When I do that, she seems like a normal person for a few minutes, and then she gets confused again. It makes me feel like I’m being naive.
When I acknowledge her disease, it makes me feel like I’m ignoring the person, my grandmother, that made my childhood alternately wonderful and frustrating.
I don’t know what to do. When I talk to her like my old grandmother I get disappointed, and when I talk to her like someone who has Alzheimer’s, I feel like I’m betraying her.
When we were growing up, my grandmother loved to make my brothers and me do Math problems. The newspaper would publish a Math problem for its readers, and she would give it to us to do. We had only a vague knowledge of what multiplication might mean as we struggled with addition and subtraction. We had no idea what division was. We knew fractions only as how to divide food three ways.
She’d bear down on us to, “Just think about it! Think! Look at the numbers and think about it!” until we were reduced to tears. It’s not like we wanted to watch television instead, we just wanted to go outside and play.
The problems were unrelenting. She was always giving us problems that were years ahead of our ability. She was giving us Algebra problems when we only knew basic arithmatic, Trigonometry problems when we only knew basic Algebra, Calculus problems when I was failing Trigonometry. For some reason she just thought it was a matter of “getting it” and not a matter of her square peg of Math being pounded into my round hole of Writing.
Once I was in college, and had finished the one and only math class I would take there, I knew I was free of her restraints. She couldn’t impose Math on me anymore. I’d make her give me the Jumble instead. The jumble always frustrated her. She could never get the final answer to the riddle if she even managed to make it though all the other words she had to unscramble first. I didn’t even gloat the first time I finished the jumble without even writing anything down before she had solved the first word. I think she just acknowledged that the jumble was my realm, and that math was her realam, and those paths would never cross again.
My grandmother wasn’t all discipline and education though. She also loved to feed us. We’d show up at her house and wander in the front door and head straight back to the kitchen. She’d toast us up some bread to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but she’d butter the bread first. That’s not how my mom made them, but they were delicious even if the idea of butter on my PB&J repulsed my delicate 7 year old stomach.
She’d serve the sandwich to us with a glass of skim milk, always cold, always skim, and we’d sit with our backs to the wall on the long bench that always trapped a child in the middle, munching on our sandwiches and listening to my parents talk to my grandparents. As we grew older, the sandwich selection grew as well. Suddenly we were offered turkey on rye with mustard; ham on white with mayo, lettuce, and tomato; or, as always, the peanut butter and jelly on buttered toast.
One Thanksgiving we were all sitting around talking, the whole family was, in a rare occurence, gathered in two adjoining rooms. Aunts, and uncles, and cousins, and parents, and grandparents, and children, and grandchildren were all happily settling into a post-feast food-coma as my brothers and I were settling into some after dinner drinks. My cousin Ryan, who was about 3 at the time, was being a spaz, and his parents couldn’t get him to settle down. At one point he ran from one room to the other and crashed into my legs, leaving a wake of adults in his path who had tried to tell him to stop, but had instead clamped up and pulled their empty hands in toward their chests once he made it past them. The room was nearly silent as I looked down at him and said, “You’d better behave or Grandmom is going to make you do math problems.”
The room exploded. Apparently we weren’t the only three who had to endure my grandmother’s request to solve math problems, we were just the most recent to be able to look back on the situation fondly and laugh.
