Death Before Death--Remembering Alzheimer's and my Grandmother Esther

This Saturday morning was a drippy, gray, fall day. Not the kind of day you like to go to the park and walk for charity. But it fit my mood, somehow--remembering Alzheimer's is never a happy day for me. I'd prefer to remember my grandmother the way she was..............before the way she was.

I'd like to think about her teaching me to knit a red scarf, casting on. I'd like to remember her needlepointing, quilting, sewing, painting. I'd like to imagine her when she was a young teacher in a single-room school, and I'd have liked to have known her when she conducted the high school choirs and taught art at all the schools.


Sometimes I think about her singing at a school bonfire before a football game for Rio Blanco County High School in 1926, standing around with the other girls in their heeled Mary Janes and dropped-waist dresses, the boys with their hair greased back, parted down the middle like Jay Gatsby and Nick Caraway, the girls in their Marcel waves looking like Daisy Buchanan. I didn't know her then.


I remember holding her velvet-gloved hand in the backseat of the car, as we rode to dinner--something we could never afford to do until Grandmother and Grandydad came for a visit, stroking her mink coat and breathing in the smell of her perfume. She would lay her hand on top of mine, then the sandwich of hands would pile on her lap as she pulled her hand from beneath to lay on top of mine, then my sister's, then mine, over and over as we giggled all the way to the restaurant.


I remember the summer she took me and my sister to Meeker to spend a week prior to my parent's arrival--the month every summer we spent with them, swim lessons and afternoons at the pool with Herb Albert and the Tiajuana Brass playing over the speakers, piano lessons for every child in town as she somehow managed to get lunch and supper done for us all. The noon whistle which signalled our run down the block to meet Grandydad as he came home for lunch from the courthouse and abstract office, a quick trip to Bernie's Super 8 to pick up ice cream. The pipe smoke that permeated their car, the cold smooth concrete of the garage floor on our barefeet. The sizzling hot asphalt smell the summer they paved the road outside the house.


I remember the smell of varnished wood and the dark comfort of polished church pews and deep red stained-glass windows...touch me not for I have not yet ascended, let the little children come unto me...The preludes and her little black chapel cap and cotta as she watched in the the rear view mirror for Father Johns to appear and begin the service. The worn black organ shoes she couldn't play without, and the way she changed them for proper pumps to go the take her sacraments at the rail, changed them back to play the music for communion.

I remember the dinner parties she would throw and the special code: FHB which meant family hold back when there were unexpected guests. The impromptu concerts on her double pianos and the family singing the old songs as she played. On special nights my dad would sing in his sweet tenor an old high school solo of "O Danny Boy."
I remember the day we baked chowmein noodle chocolate cookies and the way we gathered Nanking cherries so she could teach us how to make jelly--grandydad squeezing the cheesecloth bag as she held the strainer, purple steam rising and scarlet syrup staining our hands.

I remember the matching dresses for Easter and Christmas that arrived as if by magic, trips to Cinderella City and popcorn and balloons--things unheard of for a poor minister's daughter. I remember the phrase she taught me the summer I asked her for the drop-leaf desk, abandoned in the basement..."everything I have is yours, darling."

I remember the green Samsonite luggage and dancing by the pull-out bed in the TV room...knowing it was rude to ask, but also knowing there was Avon lipstick or perfume or bubble bath wrapped in perfection paper, golden bows and invisible tape. One for each of us every time they visited.
There was the colorful straw Ute Creek bag and cabin shoes, the crisp cotton lawn dress and rubber soled espadrilles she wore to the cabin. I never remember seeing her in pants. There was the amazement that she could drive a stick-shift truck, and she could wiggle her ears. There were the scary late night potty runs when she would appear without her perfect teeth after we hammered on the ceiling with our broom handle--the water softener whining like a ghost in the laundry room. There were hanging bags filled with dresses and peplumed suits from the Denver Dry Goods, pill-box hats and chunky-heeled shoes--a 12-year-old runway model's dream.
And there were always the days when she would pay us kids a quarter for the first one to find her keys, or her watch. There was the day she couldn't find the black organ shoes and those times she simply ignored the stop signs on the way to Bernie's Super 8. The way she would blow a stream of air across her upper lip and dab at her brow with the delicate handkerchief she always kept tucked in her blouse, singing "I must be losing my mind."

And the irony is....she was. There was the evening daddy asked her to play O, Danny Boy and she turned, her face puzzled like a little girl, and asked him, "Now how does that one go?"
When her youngest son was found alone, face-down on the floor of his apartment three days after his death, it was the last of her untroubled days. When my dad died shortly after his 50th birthday, it was her undoing. I met my grandad's plane, but the woman who was with him wasn't my grandmother. As we sat and visited in our sorrow, she asked my mother "Who was that nice little girl who picked us up at the airport?" My grandmother would have shamed the woman who struck my grandad with the shower head as he tried to get her ready for the funeral, but she wasn't there. The sweet grandmother with her impeccable manners and good taste would have been appalled at the lady who reached across the table and took food off my plate. And she would have never snuck my father's fishing knife into her luggage as we divided up his things.

Some of the moments were funny, like the time the hospital confiscated her nail file as she checked in for her evaluation, and then produced the fishing knife less than an hour later to cut out a tag from her sweater. I couldn't help but giggle at the scorch marks from the aluminum pans she had heated in the microwave and the way she mixed Mountain Dew with Scotch she kept hidden in the kitchen.

But the day she went to the Alzheimer's wing in Fruita wasn't funny. My grandad went with her so she wouldn't be alone. He took his lazy boy chair and their television, and left behind the glorious double pianos she had played her whole life. He seemed to know neither of them would ever be coming back. He caught pneumonia around Thanksgiving and we thought he would die. But with my grandmother alone, disoriented and frightened, he rallied enough to move back into their room. Fight as he might, though, he couldn't keep this modest refined girl he had married from wandering the halls in the nude, and he couldn't convince her to eat. She died of starvation shortly before Christmas--her body simply forgot to eat. We buried her in the snow overlooking the White River Valley that she adored. Less than two weeks later, we returned to lay my grandad to rest beside her.


I miss her so deeply sometimes it hurts. Her beauty went beyond the Biblical beauty of Esther--it seeped from her every pore. Champion of the underdog, generous to a fault. She was a musician supreme and a lover of art. Her taste in clothing, furnishings housewares and music was Epicurean. She was a small town girl with global knowledge and big city refinement. I sometimes pray for God to bring her back, which I'm pretty certain he won't do.

But I know without a doubt that I will see her again. And when I walk through the gates of heaven, I won't be surprised if she is playing the piano, having become the indispensable concert pianist of heaven's event calendar. And as corny as it sounds, I'm pretty sure the tune she'll be playing will be Danny Boy and my dad will be singing at her side.