I'll still feel your love

My grandmother is losing her memory. She doesn’t recognize my mom, she doesn’t recognize her own living space as her own. It’s equal parts tragedy and comedy, as she thinks her own bedroom is a hotel, then tells me she’s had her Ipad for 20 years. Oddly, the strongest feeling I get isn’t sadness, but confusion, ironically enough. It feels less like I’m losing my grandmother as much as it feels like she’s already gone, the person downstairs is more like a scattered series of recollections, all buttressed by the social mores that defined my grandmother’s life. A British housewife, she’s polite and mild-mannered, and she accepts these bizarre situations she projects herself into with relative grace. It makes it hard, to understand who she is now. Is she still my grandmother, the woman I would run downstairs to, to eat cookies and chat about my school days with, or is someone else? It’s almost like she has already passed away, and this new person has replaced her. Even my own experience is mediated, I’m not her main caregiver in the way my mother is, and I don’t have a large store of clear memory of what she was like before this to draw upon. In a way, we’re all grappling with the same distorting mirror of memory, to different degrees.

There is sadness of course, the sadness of the person you knew not being there, but being reminded of them every day. But there’s also humor, I don’t think its cruel to say that sometimes one can laugh at the confused and nonsensical beliefs held by someone with no memory. Something you start to realize is that when you have no memory, everything is equally possible. Why wouldn’t this room be a hotel, I don’t recognize it at all? Why would I assume this dog is mine? Who are you?

I’m probably not the first person to think this, but I’m left with this feeling that we’re all just memory. That’s all there is to the human, to the self as it was. Maybe there is some degree of preference for the future, but overwhelmingly it seems like a person and their idea of who they are is simply the totality of their experiences, hurtling forwards. Who are we when we lose our memory? Who do we become, with whatever is left over? It seems frightening, but also, in the same sort of Epicurean sense, how could it be scary? You wouldn’t ever realize what had changed. Forgive the 9Gag-philosophizing but maybe we’re all sort of amnesiacs.

It’s not just confusion and loss though, somehow the parting of one’s memory presents the space for old, maybe unutterable thoughts to make themselves known. She didn’t have an easy upbringing, she recalls playing in the unused bomb shelter her family built during the war, her education was cut short so her brothers could go to university. My grandmother told my mom that, growing up she never felt that she belonged to the family of her father, that she much more belonged to her mother’s family, that it was her maternal grandparents who she spent more time with and raised her. She said she still feels their love.

If that day comes for me, I think I too will still clearly feel my grandmothers love.