Thursday 30 August 2012

Forgetting the Anger


Some of you may remember my previous posts about my grandmother, Rosa. She was a strong, independent, couragious, caring, cutting, lethal woman. Her wisdom always carried questionable intentions, I valued and rejected it as I saw fit. One pearl which always stayed with me was:

 

   "It never pays to be too honest"

 

She used to live by this dictum like a knight would to their sword. Never give people too much, or they'll take advantage of you was her general point. No, my grandmother was not some sweet old lady with a jar of boiled lollies and an endless supply of embroidered pillowcases for your birthday. But goddamn I would dig her back up today just to get another plate of her lasagne.

 

She was at times a harsh, unforgiving woman, but in her final months that all changed. I recall a couples of years before she died hearing her cuss one of her long suffering sisters out over the phone- I'm sure it was well deserved- and telling her to never call her again. Her sister had been calling to wish her a happy birthday, but she was soon to regret that! A lot of their conversations went this way. When I saw my grandmother on one of my final visits to her, of which there were many when I was living overseas as I wanted to spend enough time with her before she left me, I was surprised by what I heard one morning. The same sister, never one to give up, had called for a chat and asked if she could visit. We all knew at that stage that the crossing over to immortality and into the afterworld was imminent for Rosa, so we were all trying to get on her good side lest we be haunted forever more.        
     "Sure, come over any time, it would make me happy" was Rosa's reply.

     "What?"

See, Rosa had begun to lose her grip on reality in those last months, and moreover, she had forgotten she was angry at everyone. That was not all she was forgetting. A few months earlier there was a fire still flickering somewhere in there, as she showed the signs of aging nobody wants to acknowledge; dementia. Accusations of incorrect pill dosages, anger at sisters about conversations that actually never happened. In my own stubbornness I refused to see it as dementia at first. I saw the bull headed old matriarch refusing to calm down in her old age, unable to let go of the reins, even now. But she never mentioned the cancer again after the first night. By the next time I saw her in December, it seemed she had forgotten altogether.
 "Someone gets hurt at some point"
 
I found my grandmother weaker, thinner, frailer. I also found her more delusional yet also very placid. No more fighting with family, she had let her long suffering siblings back into her life. I was relieved, as I felt a lingering sense of regret would fill the space between here and the ever after if my grandmother could not heal the tainted relationships around her. She was also convinced that there were workers on the roof repairing the broken tiles. It seemed she could hear them. Realising that telling her otherwise would be unnecessarily confusing, we would go along with it. 
    “They do a beautiful job on the roof”, she would say proudly.
    “Yeah, it's going to look nice...” I'd reply. She also was completely unaware that she had cancer. Nature's way of taking the anxiety away from the dying? I hoped so. She did, however, know instinctively her time here was running out.
    “Don' be long for me now in this world I think”, she said to me one afternoon as she looked at her skinny arms in wonderment, curious at how they had changed and her skin sagged and aged. When somebody shows signs of dementia, those around them can also begin to confuse what is real and what isn't. One day a friend had called, but I wasn't expecting it and as I was out, my grandmother answered. When I got home she told me who had called and I should call him back. Thinking she was confused and referring to a similar episode about 2 days earlier, I dismissed it. It turns out she was right, and my saying I had already called him yesterday probably only served to really confuse her! There comes a time, however, when the confused mumblings of a senile person cross that already blurry line between truth and imagination. Someone gets hurt at some point. For me it happened when my grandmother looked at me with a slightly faraway gaze and said:
     “You know, I don't know if you are my granddaughter or my nipote...”
In Italian nipote can mean granddaughter or niece, depending on context and although I knew this statement was just as noteworthy as any other random comment made by a fading old lady, it still bothered me for some time.
    “It's the same thing!” hollered Mum, and we forgot it all. However I tried justifying it in my rational brain though, I felt in my emotional mind like I was the one she had chosen to forget first. We all know better than to pay attention to these moments but we are, after all, irrational creatures who bleed when wounded. I never let on how heartbroken I was; let’s face it, it never pays to be too honest…  

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