reviving a lost mind

this past weekend, i went (with my mom, stepdad, and younger brother) to tennessee to celebrate my grandma's 81st birthday with her. part of the weekend was spent sitting around her kitchen table discussing new books we've read, or want to read, and making/eating bbq ribs, colorful and amazingly thinly-sliced veggies, and a flourless chocolate (birthday) cake.

grandma's husband died about 18 months ago, and, of late, grandma has seemed worried her large house and its insides, wondering, rightfully so, how she will ever manage to get rid of all her stuff when the inevitable time comes for her to downsize. so we volunteered to take home some things that she didn't need anymore and my brother went up into the attic and retrieved six or seven dusty, heavy boxes- full of family photos, memorabilia, papers, cancelled checks, tax records, etc. most of it had belonged to my great-grandmother, gram, and all of that had remained untouched since her death in january 1989, of alzheimer's disease.

i was profoundly affected by one particular item we found. gram kept meticulous records of her day-to-day affairs, in the form of notations in her desk calendar. we found all of her desk calendars and started pouring over them, checking, for example, how she recorded my birthday (a simple entry, dated November 17, 1977, stating my name, and my weight, height, length, and time of birth), or my brother's birthday (stating his name and "dark hair and happy. aren't we all happy?"). this entry was on October 14, 1987, at a time when alzheimer's already was affecting her mind.

we also discovered the last calendar that gram had used before she died. we held our breaths as we flipped through it. at the top of every page, she had written her full name, address, telephone number, my mother's and grandmother's names, and numbers and a little schedule of her meals (7:30 am, breakfast; 12:00 pm, lunch; 5:30 pm, dinner).

to remember.

some months, she had filled every single square with frenzied notes ("called hairdresser. she said she'd call me"), ("i can't find my eyebrow tweasers") ("borrowed eyebrow tweasers from nellie brown, she lives across the hall from me")- to the point that almost every inch of the page is inked. these pages represent the pains that she took to cling to some semblance of normalcy, even as she was losing her mind. it's both heartbreaking and fascinating.

the most compelling page was the last. it was the month of july 1988, seven months before she died. (the rest of the book is blank). the final entry is july 28, 1988. in that box, she wrote a sentence about how much she loved her late husband, noting also, with amazing accuracy, that he had died ten years ago that day.

i now feel like i have the raw materials from which to craft a book (the book i always said i wanted to write), which will be a story about my great-grandmother. writing this book gives me the chance to do for gram what, despite all her efforts, she couldn't do for herself: revive her lost mind.