“I just don’t understand why they’re doing this to me.”

Note: When my mother and aunts moved Grandma into a full-time senior center in late 2002, she was allowed to bring her small Yorkshire Terrier, “Ivy”, because Grandma was so attached to her.  In almost 100% of Grandma’s notes she talks about her love for the little dog–no one wanted to separate them.  After Grandma and Ivy had lived at the care center for a short while, Ivy nipped at a child who was visiting a family member there.  At that point, the care center decided that while Grandma could have her dog brought for visits frequently, Ivy could no longer live there.  Imagine trying to explain that to a woman in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s Disease…

[my aunt Patsy's handwriting:]

Saturday, January 18, 2003

Hi Mom!  It is Saturday–late afternoon–and I’m here to see you.  You sure do have a nice place–very cheerful and comfortable.  Mom, you are asking about Ivy and I just want you to know that Ivy is just fine at my house here in Baudette.  I am taking good care of her and she really likes living with Buttons–she has some good dog company!  Ivy and her kennel are at my house.  Last Sunday she bit at a little boy here and now they won’t let her be here.  They can’t have a dog here that might hurt somebody.  I’m so sorry–but just remember that she is fine.

You are also talking about your Mom and Dad–Edna and Leonard.  You are my Mom and Hugh was my dad.  You guys had four daughters–Carol, Nancy, Patsy, and Laurie.

Bye for now!  Have a nice bath tonight and I will take you to my house for a while tomorrow, OK?  You will be with Ivy there!  Love you!  ~Patsy

Grandma’s next notes were from the next night, after my aunt had returned to drop her off after spending the afternoon at her house (about a mile from the care center).

[my grandma's handwriting:]

It’s 25 minutes after 8 P.M. and I just came down to my room #326A.  I have been alone all day here except for when I go out to the dining room where people are eating.  Which I haven’t done for a while, but I did bring some coffee.  But no Ivy, no daughters, just me–it’s 8:30 PM.

The next day, she wrote again.

It’s a new day, 3 P.M., when somebody came and said I had a phone call.  It was Nancy * in Las Vegas, her husband is Bill.  She said she was 2,000 miles from me here in Baudette.  I have had Ivy during the day and somebody picks her up in the evening.  Today I haven’t seen her.  But it sure was nice to get Nancy’s phone call; she is my daughter and Bill is her husband.

Now it’s 35 minutes before 4 P.M. and I am still alone, but I will go out to the dining room where people are still eating there and bring my coffee with me.  I don’t understand why my daughters do this to me, I did everything I possibly could for them when they were growing up!

It’s a new day, now, 15 minutes before 5 P.M. and I’m still alone–no Ivy!

It’s 5 P.M. now and I just came down to my room–brought my coffee with me.  I’m still alone and it’s 7:00 P.M. now.  No Ivy, no coffee, nothing but me and my note pad.  No daughters, either!  It’s 20 minutes before 7:15 P.M. and I’m still alone.

The family struggled for several weeks trying to get grandma to understand why her best friend was suddenly gone.  They could describe what had happened every day, and she’d still forget by the time she returned to her room after dinner and Ivy wasn’t there.  Shortly after Ivy lost her residency status, my aunt brought grandma a little stuffed puppy that she named “Brownie”.  By the following summer when I returned home from college to celebrate Independence Day with my family, Grandma didn’t ask so much about Ivy anymore and carried the now-well-worn stuffed puppy with her wherever she went.

Grandma’s Journals

Today I spent a few hours re-reading all of Grandma’s handwritten journals that she kept during the last few years of her life.  I have read them before; two years ago when Mom first gave them to me, I read through them all but quickly became overwhelmed and too emotional to do much with them aside from organize them into chronological order.

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That was no easy task, either–it seems that sometimes she wrote in more than one notebook during the same period of time.  Other times, she’d go back and “fill in” blank spots on previous pages.  Mostly she just stopped counting the date at all anymore, and only relied on the time of day and exterior “reminders” of the season (Christmas trees during the winter holidays, the temperature or amount of light in a day, etc.  While trying to re-order her notes I had to depend heavily on little messages written in the books from her visitors here and there.  Sometimes several weeks passed without mention of a date…

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I noticed highs and lows in her mood and temperament, and distinct periods of “lucidity” among the months of nearly identical updates about coffee and the weather and her dog, Ivy.  Today I studied the journals more closely than I had allowed myself last time and I was really grateful to come away thinking that although she had bad days, for the most part Grandma was always the same person we always knew, with or without her memories.  She was so faithful and loving to her beloved little dog, and so grateful for every single visitor who ever stopped to see her.  Shortly before she stopped writing any longer, she wrote “There are lots of people here [LakeWood Care Center in Baudette] in wheelchairs and walking with canes–makes me realize how lucky I am.”

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Hopefully I will do her memory the honor it deserves!

The Goat, Judy Garland and Grand Rapids, MN.

When I was growing up, Grandma Shirley talked about Judy Garland all the time.  “Grandma, I already know this one,” I’d complain when she started the story, but she’d just continue anyway.

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“You know, Judy Garland from The Wizard of Oz,” she’d explain.  And I did know; each time Grandma came over to babysit us while Mom and Dad had parent-teacher conferences or volleyball or whatever, Grandma would bring over her tote full of her favorite VHS cassettes.  Anything with Shirley Temple or Elvis, The Secret Garden, Miracle on 34th Street, most videos in black and white, and not a single one was my idea of something good to watch while Grandma was over to visit.  Usually we’d end up talking.

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“Judy Garland wasn’t her real name, you know,” she’d always say.  Then she’d tell the story of Frances Gumm and her family of flamboyant singers, dancers and actors who moved to Grand Rapids, MN and lived in the house down the street from Grandma and her family for several years.  Grandma was only a year older than Ms. Garland and the way she talked about her, I thought they must have been very good friends.   I always pictured the girl with the ruby slippers from Grandma’s video with my grandma as young girls, playing together in the woods and down along the river bank as I did with my young friends.

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Inevitably her story about Judy Garland would transition to a story about Grandma’s unique family pets kept in their home while they lived in Grand Rapids.  When I was a girl, the pets were two huge dogs.  I don’t know if she told me they were Great Danes or if this is just what I always pictured when she talked about the huge beasts that towered over their fence in the back yard and got loose one night, spurring an exciting chase and rescue as the dogs ran into downtown Grand Rapids and began popping in and out of shops and restaurants.

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As time passed and I became a teenager, Grandma kept telling her stories but soon it became clear that something was going on with her memory.  By the time I was a sophomore in college and Grandma was living full-time in a senior care center, her story about the Great Danes running down the streets of Grand Rapids had turned into a story about goats.  Goats.  And at that point we didn’t correct her or ask for clarification; we were just happy if she had remembered who we were that day.

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It’s hard to watch a family member lose their treasured memories to Alzheimer’s Disease.  I didn’t appreciate Grandma’s stories when she told them and never understood the importance of her colorful history until it was too late.  But Grandma Shirley’s history is my history; her story is mine, too.  And while I can’t go back in time and ask her to tell me those stories again so I can write them down and understand their true value, I can work with what I still have left of my Grandma and in that way honor her memory and her stories.

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In a box on a shelf at home, I have the journals my grandma kept in the years before her death.  I was only 22 when she passed away and still so caught up in my own unfolding story that I never gave hers a thought until it was too late.  When I read through her journals, I sense a woman who was scared of losing her history.  There are birthdays and anniversaries jotted on random scraps of paper stuffed into notebooks and family recipes jotted in the margins of pages upon pages of sheer data that would seem so unimportant to the uneducated observer; details of each and every phone call made and received, coffee made, coffee drunk, lunch eaten and walks taken.  “2:42 PM November 13, 2003: My grand-daughter Stephanie came to visit me today.  She lives in Minneapolis, I think, and goes to college there.  She has to go back to Minneapolis this afternoon.  She is my daughter Laurie’s daughter.”

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I don’t exactly know how to keep these memories alive, but this seems as good a method as any.

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Miss you, Grandma.

Shirley (left, age 21) and her sister Wanda in 1942.