There are three distinct memories I have of my grandfather.
"Let's go out on the back porch for a drinky-poo and a little discussion."
My grandfather thought this was the most hilarious thing to come out of anyone's mouth, so the fact that it came out of mine at the age of 7 was just fuel on the fire. From that day on, our tradition was to spend our Saturday afternoons just before dinner on his back porch with our drinky-poos and talking the afternoon away. (And, no, there was no 'poo' in the drink....just alcohol in his, and soda in mine.) I don't know why we had so much to discuss, and I didn't know it would mean more to me later than it did at the time.
"Over-over-down-down."
Again, at the age of 7 I still had not mastered the fine art of shoelace tying. Much like bike riding, it remained an elusive skill that everyone else knew the 'secret' to, except for me. The shoes were my first lace-up shoes, and they were Keds that had pink and green flowers all over them. I thought they were the coolest shoes that ever existed, and I certainly wasn't going to not wear them just because I was a shoelace 'tard. When Papa found out that I STILL didn't know how to tie my shoes and was wearing the ugliest Velcro shoes EVER (once you got to the bigger sizes in Velcro shoes, your choices were limited to ugly...and ass ugly), he took matters into his own hands. That day we had a drinky-poo and a little shoelace tying intervention.
"Laura, something's wrong with Papa."
I LOVED my grandfather. We were pals. We went for walks around his neighborhood. He bought me my first bike, and although I taught myself how to ride it once we had hauled it from Baltimore to Fredericksburg, it ranked up there among those life events that fathers just do. He was my second father, the one that picked up the slack when mine was too tired from working, grad school, and Reserves.
So, when my grandfather could no longer mask his Alzheimer's with silence, pretending to know what was going on, or drinking...our family mourned...no one more than my mother. He had been everything to her, a father to me, and provider to us all. We entered into unchartered territory - mourning a loss that was unseen. It's grief that is not obvious, a grief that hides behind closed doors. You're forced to leave the person you knew behind and live with the person your loved one will become.
The thing no one tells you about Alzheimer's is that it robs you of a 'normal' and quick grieving process once your loved one is gone. It takes almost as long to grieve for their true loss as it did for them to degrade into mental oblivion - very slowly. Rather than a ripped band-aid, you're forced to slowly rip it...hair by hair. Your memories become as those who have Alzheimer's - foggy and from long ago, since it's been so long since you made any ones you'd like to keep.
Papa is hard for me to carry around with me. He lives within me, but as the grandfather I knew until I was 18 rather than the one from 14 years later. He doesn't visit me in my dreams, and my soul does not seek him out - and that's the real tragedy.
