by Mell P
My grandmother’s journey to what I thought was a care facility ended in her peaceful passing during the night. The news was a bewildering blow, especially considering we dropped her off on Sunday evening and she was gone before the week end. The recent disagreements we had over small matters like mopped floors were a distant memory now that she was no longer with us, and little did I know that her behavior might have been a sign of something more serious lurking beneath the surface.
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Reflecting, it becomes clear that Alzheimer’s may have been silently affecting my grandmother. Unbeknownst to us, my mother and I, although we suspected something was off based on revelations throughout her stay with us, she was never officially diagnosed, and the subtle hints of her condition went unnoticed.
I remember brushing off whispers of Alzheimer’s from a church acquaintance, assuming it was merely a misunderstanding. The challenges we faced at home seemed exhausting, but sometimes as a caregiver, you become so consumed with the day-to-day battle of getting through, that no thought is given to what the patient is experiencing, in this case, the true battle my grandmother was silently fighting.
Granny Carmen, as we called her, was a short, little lady who bore four children, my mother Merle, and Alfred with my grandfather, St. Clair, and her other two children – Jackie and Steve, with men we never knew anything about.
The reason she came to live with my mom and me was because my Uncle Steve called one day to say she fell and hit her head and he could not watch her anymore. My grandmother up to this point was living on her own in the tiny one-bedroom house where my mother and her siblings were raised. It was a wooden structure located in Belmont, Trinidad. I only ever knew her in that place where the streets were almost too narrow for two cars to pass at the same time. I always wondered as a child who did the planning for these roads in the area – they weren’t too brilliant at all.
I always knew her as a woman on the go. She was a cleaner at the convent in Port of Spain for many years, as far as we knew, and shared many a story about the nuns there. I was quite sure as a kid she invented many of those stories herself. She spoke fluent Latin and tried to teach me some words, which to this day have escaped me.
In the months that she lived with us, there was a restructuring of everything, and this should have been a sign. I hid everything from my jewelry to my keys to clothing, because she was convinced I was stealing from her and she would sneak into my room to reclaim her stolen goods. We had many stand-offs at home.
She would sometimes stand at the louvered door in our kitchen that led to the street and shout to people to call for help, saying we had kidnapped her and were keeping her hostage.
One of my most vivid memories is when she found the key, opened the door, and strolled outside barefoot, in her nightgown into a neighbor’s yard on the corner of our street. She somehow convinced this neighbor who was a recluse, and who I also suspect had dementia at the time, to go off with her somewhere. They were both missing for a couple of hours until some young men in my neighborhood saw them sitting on a broken water pipe chatting the evening away. I blamed myself. I have no idea how they found each other. That neighbor never spoke to anyone. How did my grandmother know to talk to her? How did she get her out of the house?
I swear, back then, I thought they spoke a secret language only they understood.
This strange behavior confused me, but then again I was young, in my late teens, and passed it off as ‘old age’. The grandmother I knew and had grown accustomed to was a busy lady who I visited two to three times a week after school. She always had tea and snacks on deck, and would hustle through her one-bedroom apartment getting ready for ‘work’. She said then that she had to get there for 5 pm. Most times she jetted off after 6 pm and we never suspected that there was no work. We thought she was always late. This went on for almost a decade.
As the days went by, it became evident that her actions were not just quirks but signs of a deeper struggle. Her confusion with everyday objects, accusations of theft, and moments of wandering off painted a heartbreaking picture of her deteriorating mental state. The memories she shared of her past hinted at a mind grappling with the past and present, unknowingly slipping away from us.
In the end, her passing left me with a heavy heart and tremendous guilt for not being more intuitive. If only we had recognized the signs earlier, perhaps we could have understood her struggles and provided the support she needed. But now, all that remains are bittersweet memories of having after-school snacks at her house, her calling me a ‘peche’, which in I learned in French means having the peach; being in high spirits, and having a lot of energy (a description that only meant she saw me ), and the haunting realization of what could have been if we understood the signs early on and provided her some treatment.
My recent conversation with Dr. Tanveer Mir, Chair of Medicine at South Brooklyn Health in Coney Island, cleared up all of my doubt and I know now we were dealing with something far beyond what we were prepared for.
