On Being Memory
My grandparents were high school sweethearts. I think. At least, that’s what I remember my Dad telling me once. When I think long and hard about it though, I’m not sure I can definitively say my grandparents even went to high school. But there’s a faded black and white photo I saw once (I think) of a young woman sitting on a grassy hill. She’s wearing a poodle skirt and laughing. That woman, my memory assures me, was my grandmother as a teen. I think my Grandfather took that photo, though I have no reason to think he did. Just a feeling.
What I can put together from there, based on other stories I remember being told at various points in my own life, was that they were totally committed to each other and their faith. I think a lot of that information comes from my Dad, who I think secretly (or perhaps not so secretly) harbours some resentment towards them, as those commitments seem to have come at the expense of their relationship with their children.
But love each other they certainly did.
So when my Grandmother started losing her memory decades ago, my Grandfather tried to hide it. I don’t know these specifics, but I have been told he took care of her and filled in the gaps alzheimers created in her day-to-day life, in her memory of herself. It worked for a few years, I understand, but of course, as was surely inevitable, he was found out. He had a heart attack and was admitted to the hospital, and in his absence his children became acquainted with the realities of their mother’s condition.
Grandma moved into a nursing home shortly after. She hated it. Was “spittin’ mad” I imagine my Dad saying (though she certainly wouldn’t ever think of spitting, and Dad would probably know better than to suggest that she might ever). The happy woman on the hill faded fast behind whatever sadness was able to make its way out of her newly medicated mind.
But Grandpa was still there. Every day, I’m told, he would dress up in his Sunday best and visit his wife and her frowns. The nurses called him “Dapper Earl.” I have only testimony to this, but I have no reason to doubt it at all. I have no idea what they might have called my grandmother, but her name was Bertha, so maybe that was enough.
Years went by, and Dapper Earl kept going to visit Bertha. Her meds got stronger, her frowns deeper. She remembered less and less and then nothing. The nurses, with whom I was acquainted somewhat, would remark on my Grandpa’s continued visits. “She’s gone,” they would say, “but he still shows up with a round of Timmie’s for us all, bright and early every day, dressed to the nines.”
Grandma hadn’t said a word in years, apparently, the day she turned to my Grandpa after he’d kissed her forehead goodbye, just as he’d always done.
“I love you, Earl.”
The nurses were shocked to hear it. They were even more shocked to learn that my Grandpa had another heart attack the next day, and was gone by the end of the week.
My Dad tells me Grandpa said he was “just heading up early to get the place ready for Bertha” as the hospital staff wheeled him towards the hospice where he would spend his last hours praying and singing hymns. Bertha joined him a few months later. I’m sure Grandpa had everything set up just the way she would want it.
Both my Dad’s parents are gone and have been for a long time now. I find myself telling this story a lot. Let’s face it: it’s a doozy. Has all the right pathos in all the right places. But I wonder sometimes how much of it is real. I was never close to my grandparents, and by all accounts, this story has little to do with me. But it’s a story that in many ways tests the limits of mortality, consciousness, and memory, and so I keep telling it as a way to show human limits who’s boss.
What does Bruce Willis have to do with this? Well, he’s not doing too well. And it’s the nature of his unwell that brings those same limits to question. If a person can lose their memories of their loved ones, do they also lose themselves? Who is a person in themselves if the only memories of them are from others? I never knew my grandparents, but I remember them enough to tell this story. There’s a lot of theory out there about the nature of the self as it is constructed within the purview of the gaze. What about the self as it lives on in the constructed memory of stories?
I don’t have answers. But we’ll always have Die Hard. And as far as I’m concerned, my grandparents will always have each other.