In 2018, I said goodbye to Nanna. She told me not to come back for her funeral. Four years later when I returned to visit, she didn’t know who I was.
She called me ‘the man from Germany’. ‘What a nice man you are,’ she said, smiling from her couch in front of the TV. Anne sat behind us at the dining table, watching our interaction. Nanna turned over the back of the couch. ‘Why didn’t you tell me he was such a nice man?’
‘Well I didn’t know he was a nice man,’ My auntie said.
I stayed focused on my Nanna. I was the nice man from Germany. I was holding her hand.
‘She’s having one on you,’ Nanna said with a knowing smile.
I said yeah, she was.
‘But you can take it,’ Nanna said.
Yeah.
***
In 1997 I wanted a biscuit. Nanna took the tin from the top shelf on the cupboard. looking down at me, she held onto them without taking off the lid of the tin. I said please, and she took one out of the tin without giving it to me. I asked again. She almost handed it to me and then took it back. I didn’t understand. I said please again, frustrated. She laughed and did the same thing. I tried saying thank you, please, thank you, over and over, until I was in tears, my face all screwed up. Nanna was really laughing now. I balled up my fists and started crying in earnest, my pleases and thank yous reduced to blubbering and stammering. Shaking her head, Nanna finally gave me the biscuit, and walked back into the living room. I stayed there and cried some more. I don’t remember if I ate the biscuit or not.
***
In 2011, Nanna told me her mother died when she was a little girl. I was sitting at the kitchen bench at Mum and Dad’s place, while Nanna was at the dining table below me, having a cup of tea.
Her mother had been ill and bedridden for days and while the maid was usually the one to bring her meals, Nanna volunteered because she wanted to go see her Mum.
‘When I went up I only had to look at her once and I knew. I was too young to understand it but I looked at her face and I just knew.’
She ran downstairs and started yelling to her father, ‘Mum’s dead, she’s dead.’
Nanna’s father took over raising the kids. Unfit for the task, at a time when a man alone looking after his kids was unheard of, even shameful, he looked for a way out.
‘I saw our maid run out the door, she was running as fast as she could from the house. She never came back.’
Nanna and her brothers were put in a catholic orphanage where they were raised until they were old enough to leave.
Some years before, Dad told me, in the same breath as telling me he grew up to be a bastard, that Nanna’s older brother sheltered and protected them from the worst of the abuse in the orphanage.
Nanna raised her kids atheist. ‘I once asked Mum if there was a God,’ Dad told me. ‘She looked at me and she said “You’re a smart monkey, son.”’
***
In 2006 I came over to do some yard work for a bit of money. Ben (our grandpa who didn’t like to be called Grandpa), had a garden out the back with a fence in front of it. A metal, hand-painted sign hung on the fence that read Kew Gardens.
Kew Gardens was Ben’s unfinished project. It would be ready someday, but not today. ‘Can we go look at Kew Gardens?’ Simon and I would ask, knowing Ben would tell us some representatives were coming over from England and he had to keep it hidden until then. It was his top secret garden.
That day, we of course weren’t to be working in Kew Gardens. We were in the front where the rose bushes were, and I was tasked with digging out the weeds that had grown rampant over the years.
We arrived with Dad and Nanna came up to us both. She thanked me for coming to help out and said what a huge help it was going to be, the garden really needed to be done.
‘Well, I’m only here for the money,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ said Nanna. ‘Well.’
And then I went off to work.
A few hours later after I’d been at it for a while, listening to the Offspring on my iPod nano, it was time to break for lunch. Dad intercepted me before I made it to the back patio where Nanna had put lunch out.
‘You’d better go speak to Nanna,’ Dad said to me as I was wrapping my earphones around my iPod.
‘What?’
‘She’s really upset, she’s in there crying. You’ve really upset her.’
I went into the kitchen and Nanna had her back to me standing at the sink. She was next to the sign above the oven that read ‘Nanna’s Kitchen: Kids eat free’
‘Nanna?’
When she turned around I already burst into tears. She cried too and she hugged me and told me don’t worry, go have your lunch.
***
In 2024 I visited Nanna on one of her good days. The hospital was amongst a little village, small roads twisting between the houses. I felt disoriented sitting in the back seat while Mum drove us in there.
Nanna was having lunch so we went into the kitchen area. There was a table of 3 old ladies sitting around a table, playing some kind of card game in slow motion. At least, two seemed to be playing. The third one, a woman with straw-like brown hair, sat with her head lolled to the side.
Washed out whites and greens decorated the kitchen and dining area. The kitchen led out to a garden and on the opposite side was a living room that was all carpeted, with big puffy couches, a large TV, and the carpet was a display of colourful geometric shapes.
Mum greeted everyone as we walked in. ‘Hi Barbara’, she said and Barbara said ‘Hello dear’. Barbara was one of the women playing the card game.
Over by the door there was an old man sitting up straight in his chair, wearing a black bowler hat and a black blazer. He was alone at the table.
I gave a kind of scattered hello to the room before locking onto my Nanna. She was by herself in the corner. There was a naked baby with teased brown hair sitting on the table in front of her. .
‘Hi Nanna,’ Mum said. Mum’s nursing tone comes out when she speaks to Nanna. Not kind enough to be too familiar, not too obnoxious to be patronising.
‘Hi Mumbo’, Dad said.
‘This is your grandson,’ Mum said in that tone again. ‘Tom, your grandson.’
Nanna looked up at me and smiled. I reached out to hold her hand but she didn’t seem to notice so I let it fall. Sitting down I kept one eye on the baby.
Conversation with someone who has dementia is an exercise in social cues. There are no topics you follow through on, return to, or which branch off into others. You can’t share life updates and expect them to congratulate you, pity you, or commiserate with you. You can’t ask them what they did today or what their plans are next week or if their friend dropped by for a chat earlier.
This doesn’t mean you don’t talk.
Nanna has always been chatty and she still is. She told us about her dogs, her grandkids, her kids, her time living on a military base in Malaysia, and how lovely she thinks it is here, in this hospital. It all came out in one stream with sentences that taper off into nonsense and re-emerge a few utterances later, on a different topic.
We nodded when it seemed like she was trying to explain something, we laughed when she laughed, and picked a new topic when she got a fearful look in her eyes. At one point I winked at Nanna, an error in judgement. She got confused and tried to explain to Mum and Dad what she’d just seen, twitching her face to imitate the action and referring to my ‘beady eyes’.
‘I’ve got so much to say, but I can’t…’
‘They really are good to us here.’
‘The kids won’t go where I tell them’
‘They’re just keeping me alive here.’
Finally, I had to ask about the Baby on the table. ‘Oh, this is Barbara’s baby.’ She picked it up. It had wrinkles on the skin and detailed, blue eyes. ‘She loves it, she cradles it, and sings to it.’
Nanna snorted a laugh, as if wondering what kind of a madhouse we’ve got her locked up in.
***
In old age we become our illness. We know something will get us in the end, but we don’t know what it will be. We live our lives as healthy people do—in ignorance of inevitable sickness.
In this way, there are two deaths that occur. The final one is the big one, but the one that comes before is more pernicious. It is a death of history and identity.
Our final illnesses take such big swings at our bodies that we become branded with them. Nanna was a professional golfer, now she can’t get out of her wheelchair. She was always reading and had dreams of being a writer when she was young, now she can hardly string a sentence together. Our skin drains of its colour, we shrink into our clothes and into our hair. We recede and the illness protrudes.
In 2011, I asked Nanna if I could one day write about her life. Without a pause, she gave me her answer.
‘When I’m dead.’
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