My grandma is staying with us this week. I haven't seen her in a year, but was aware of her declining senses from stories and from my own experience with her just before I left. It’s been a new slice of cake altogether with her being further along and in person for a week, and a weird one; She giggles a lot, and you get the impression that when she doesn't follow a conversation she covers by talking about something that happened to her 3 hours ago, that she's already talked about twice because it's something she knows about. I guess I don't have any feelings about her decline because I don't really know WHAT to feel. We have never been very close, though I liked her plenty, but as I've grown older stories of my father and his sisters childhoods have come up, and I see her now as another human being, rather than my grandma.
A human being with faults. Plenty of them. Perhaps you think it's ridiculous to expect an 80 year old woman with Alzheimer’s to start apologizing for things from the past now. I guess it is; she won't be able to remember whether or not she actually did whatever it is you’re resentful about. What’s worse is she never really stopped doing the stupid things; she's never become aware of how much she damaged her kids, especially her daughters, who, with no example to go by hurt their kids, though in different ways. I know that the people that might have treated her badly in her childhood probably never apologized, but I struggle to indulge her or even feel kindly toward her endless giggling, endless stories and flirty behavior with men.
This morning she started giving me a tarot reading while I was eating my cereal. What my feelings are about tarot are not as important as how much I didn't want to let my grandma into anything remotely personal with me. I didn't even think about what I felt about my relationship with her till she got Alzheimer’s.
I guess realizing that seeing her in a somewhat innocent state evoked no feelings of sympathy, not even the knowledge that she had cancer a few years ago(I hadn’t been worried at the time as I was sure she’d pull through). I would like to find a way to move past whatever bad feelings I have about her, but I haven't yet found it and maybe the only solution is to feel nothing about it at all.