Sylvia Wynter's Dream

A branch broke from the tree, a jarring sound in the silence of the family house. But it was not the harsh snap that frightened me, but that the sound was the voice of my grandmother, walking hauntingly towards the couch at 4am.

“Suzie? What are you doing up? Why yuh not getting ready to leave?” She said to me. Her eyes were watery, her brows were furrowed, her mouth was twisted. She stared at me with clear frustration, and this broke me, as there was nothing I could do to help. If I was ‘Suzie’, my mother, her daughter, maybe I could de-escalate. Maybe I’d know what memory my grandmother was reliving. Maybe I’d answer and she’d be soothed, and sit beside me on the couch as I worked. But this memory must have been before my time, before my branch of the family tree. 

“It’s not Suzie, grandma. I’m Mel, remember? I’m just getting some work done, remember I told you last night?” I said to her, staring back at her familiar brown eyes. 

Are you still there, grandma? Am I?

But her eyes didn’t meet mine with familiarity. The eyes she passed to her daughter, and then to me, looked back at me with pure confusion. There was no ‘Mel ’, no me in her memory at this time. Her daughter was still just her daughter… and I was just a girl sitting in her living room that looked just like her. 

“Dementia steals memories, but it cannot steal love.

As my grandmother’s dementia progressed quickly over the course of five months, each time I am greeted with the name of my mother, I am forgotten. When my grandmother suffers from a moment in the past she is anxiously reliving, another branch breaks from the family tree. Every Christmas dinner shared together and the recycled jokes passed around the dining table have been removed from her mind, lost in the deepest parts that no one else can access.

It was hard coming to terms with it. Seeing a woman that looks, sounds, walks, and talks like the grandma I’d come to love laying in her bed quietly. She sometimes vaguely recognizes that I am a relative, but who I actually am is lost. She cannot place my name or my face in relation to her anymore. Whenever I visit my grandma, it’s as if I was never even born. The same fate awaits my youngest cousin, too young to understand that the frail old woman that is too anxious to leave the house; that cries in church because she doesn’t know where she is; that innately knows her nightly routines but often needs help to carry them out correctly, is not the same grandma I grew up with. The grandma with a million recipes up her sleeve, with the most vast knowledge of plants and herbs, the grandma that never failed to make me feel loved and beautiful when i needed it most…

My grandma is hilarious and feisty, vibrant and creative, sentimental and soothing- having lost some of the best parts of her to dementia, do I now say she was all these things? 

Though I may be lost in her memory, she’s not lost in mine. She’s still here, she’s otherwise healthy and doing the best she can. Still the fearless Theda I grew up hearing stories from my own mother about!