Memory and Dust

My grandmother’s brain is flaking away, like dead skin cells...unseen decay whose results we discover later when we trace our fingers and leave a path in the dust. For months, she has been calling me, confusing my phone number for my father’s. Her 92-year-old voice trembles and quakes, rises in crescendos as the panic and paranoia scratch at what’s left. Flakes in the air. Do memories fade in different ways? Where do they go when they’re gone? The end result is the same, I suppose.

I was checking out at the supermarket, buying a bottle of cheap (but not too cheap) white wine for a dinner party, and a package of small, chewy cookies for dessert. I had an incessant desire to sate my sweet tooth. It would likely be my demise, end-stage diabetes would kill me.

The middle-aged woman in front of me was buying frozen dinners, frozen vegetables, frozen fruit, all small portions. Under the sterile fluorescent lights, her face was sallow and puffy. Pinchable fat swung from her aging arms. The years collected as pounds beneath her bones. Cheap jewelry adorned her wrists and she struggled to get the debit card out of her purse. Loneliness kills people all the time. Given the choice, I’d rather be taken by diabetes, foot by foot.

When it was my turn to slide my card into the machine, my phone buzzed. My grandmother’s number appeared, so I handed money to my wife and stepped out of the line. Before I even heard her nonagenarian voice, I could picture her thinning honeycomb hair, standing straight on her scalp. In my mind, she wore a maroon cardigan, with brooches, and plastic rimmed glasses. She was a broad woman, at least five feet eight inches tall, with wide shoulders and hips. She was a Missouri farm girl and had never been skinny, nor did she particularly want to be considered skinny. She played catcher when she was a kid and the other children made sure to tell her she was an adequate backstop. Nothing could get by her, they said. She was too encompassing, too sturdy. Her body was a fortress.

In her later years, varicose veins strangling her legs, she began using a crutch to get around. The tool diminished her in some hard-to-define way, made her smaller in my mind. She could not stoop into a crouch anymore, there was a persistent slouch in her shoulders. But she was still physically stronger than most of her peers. A fortress in disrepair.

“Lee?” she asked when I answered the phone and said hello.

“No grandma, it’s Chris. Are you OK?”

She huffed and then paused. “Are you with LK? (My father’s nickname.) I need to talk to him.”

“I’m at the store right now. I can call him if you want.”

“Are any of my family there?”

“No, I’m alone. My parents are at dinner. Are you OK?”

“Kathy and Tom aren’t there?” Kathy and Tom, my aunt and uncle, live down the street from my grandmother in small-town Missouri. To my knowledge, they have never visited my family in Ohio.

“I’m in Cleveland.”

“Oh, yes. I know.”

The conversation followed a rote pattern. My grandmother, who used a rolodex and landline to call the outside world, confused my phone number for my father’s with regularity. When dementia set in, these talks happened more often. In the beginning, the mistaken identity was saccharine, an innocent mistake leading to a sweet conversation. Lately, our talks were nefarious and taxing. They thrust me front-and-center at the carnival of my grandmother’s degradation.

In painful detail, she laid out why she was desperately seeking my father’s help. She was, she explained, being held hostage in an unfamiliar home in Belton, Missouri. She wanted to go home, to her house on Ferry Street, across town. My uncle and aunt had driven her out to this house around Christmas and left her, refusing to take her back to her homestead. A month had passed, she said, and she needed so badly to go home. She didn’t want to be here anymore. Help me go home, she begged.

Of course, she hadn’t lived on Ferry Street in nearly three decades. The unfamiliar home she was “kept in" was her own. The squat ranch on the corner of Truman Parkway had been built to her specifications in the 1990s. The furniture in the sun room, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, the living room...she recognized it, knew it was hers. But she assumed, wrongly, that Kathy and Tom had smuggled her furniture into this place in the night. They decorated it for Christmas, told her it was a party, she said. An artificial tree glowing and rotating in the living room, the fridge stocked with food. Everything was being done to make her seem senile, you see. It was a play for her money.

The first time she told me of this conspiracy against her, I half-believed her. She was my grandmother. I wanted to believe what she believed. It wasn’t easy anymore.

Faced with a stark and unpleasant reality, my grandmother’s mind had two choices: accept its own impending death and live in a world of fluid surfaces, or concoct spiraling, incoherent fictions to explain an increasingly unexplainable world. Like all of us would, her mind chose the latter.

One of my baser beliefs, one of the ones I rarely vocalize, is that a sickness undiagnosed is easier to defeat than a sickness understood. When you first get sick, really sick, it’s possible to convince yourself nothing is happening. At worst, you say, I’m suffering from a cold. It’s that time of the year, it’s going around. Everyone shits blood once in a while. It must have been the tacos.

Once you comprehend what is happening to you, and what will happen to you, the mind gears itself toward that outcome. If you imagine, over and over and over, the accumulating cancer in your lower intestine, its ravenous expansion into your colon, then the cancer has already spread. You are dead while breathing.

Ignore it and you will still likely die. But you may extend your days in the sun, live for a bit longer in the bliss of ignorance.

This is a stupid belief, of course. Chemotherapy and other cancer treatments have matured since their inception. Vaccines have been developed for certain types of cancer. Medical evolution is constant, if opaque.

Still...the niggling belief that ignorance is safer, somehow.

I end the call with my grandmother, assuring her my father will talk to her soon. I tell her I’ll reach out to him immediately and I do. He is at dinner with my mother and their friends. I leave him a voicemail. I replace my phone in my pocket and consider the matter dealt with.

My wife, with her saucer pan blue eyes, is staring at me. She knows something has happened and wants to know what. I tell her and she apologizes, as if it was her fault, gives me a brief hug and then we go to the car. We place the wine and cookies into the backseat and then climb inside. We buckle up and the engine turns then catches, a familiar and reassuring roar. I fiddle with my cell phone, trying to decide between Parquet Courts and Vampire Weekend for our short drive.

My phone buzzes again. It’s my grandmother. I answer and her voice comes through my car speakers.

“Lee?” she asks.

I turn and look at my wife. Those pale blue eyes, etched with scars on one side, reflect my concern, my sudden sense of trapped melancholy.

“No, grandma. It’s Chris,” I tell her and pull the car out of the parking lot and onto the road.

She unfurls the same story. She has no memory of talking to me five minutes earlier. In the brief, wallowing silence between our calls, her urgency has grown. She wants to go home. She wants to go home right damn now.

As she spins her tale, Hayley, whispers to me, “Tell her she’ll be OK. Tell her she’s going to be alright.”

“You’re going to be OK. You’re going to be fine.”

“No, I am not. No. This is not OK, Christopher. I just want to go home,” she begins crying.

Headlights pass in the night. The horizon is a gash of orchid and carmine, the two colors swirling amid clouds and a slow setting sun. I am prone to headaches and there is a throbbing gnawing at my left temple. Phosphenes dance before my eyes, imprints of light faded.

Grandma keeps talking. I drive slowly along.

We pull into a condo complex, where our dinner party is being hosted. An old woman in a thick winter coat is walking a poodle in the street, beneath the glow of streetlamps. The condos are painted wood, with shingled roofs. Every two units are fenced together with cast iron. Each condo has a brick patio. The night is crisp, warmer than usual, but no one will be outside tonight. Patches of greying snow melt on curbs and browning grass. The complex feels both lived in and abandoned. It is a surreal environment for driving.

With the mercurial force of a tempest, Grandma batters us with hoarse shouting before calming to a whinnying plea for help. She begs me to drive down the street to her. She begs me to get my father and come to her house. Just please, please help.

In her mind, we're a stone's throw away. By car, we are 14 hours away, at best.

After negotiation and listening and gentle prodding, my grandmother agrees to hang up. She agrees to a detente, if I can reach my father. I hang up with her and immediately dial my dad. It again goes to voicemail, so I type out a text, “Please call immediately. SOS. Emergency.”

Then Hayley says, “I’m so sorry, Chris.” And I smile and nod and say we should go inside. So we gather up the wine and cookies and hug our friends. They bring out their infant, nearly 10 months old, and I make him chuckle by doing Scooby Doo voices. My wife holds him in her arms, adjusting to his 20 pound frame by bouncing up and down. He likes the movement and smiles and waves his formless arms. He is chubby but in an effervescent way. This isn’t fat collected over years, but weight meant to be burnt in growth, pounds meant for the fire. The boy’s mother sets out a blanket and toys and Hayley crouches down and plays with him. I sip white wine and try to be present.

My father eventually calls my grandmother, does his best to calm her down. Who knows how well it works, or for how long the peace holds. I’d guess hours, at best.

I try not to think of that, try to smile and play peek-a-boo with the baby. He won’t remember me when he is older. Or my wife. This memory will exist for me, but he's unlikely to recall this evening.