Hollowing the Stalks

Almost as soon as I arrive, we are working on the rhubarb. In front of my grandfather’s home, between the front door and the road, is a full-sized tennis court surrounded by about an acre of grass, flowerbeds, and garden. The rhubarb is planted in a series of several rows beyond the furthest corner of the tennis court and is profligate in vegetal fecundity when I arrive. If you leave rhubarb too long, the plant flowers and will taste bitter. When this happens, the plant is said to have bolted, and the stalks have become hollow, useless. We spend the better part of two days squatting in these rows with kitchen knifes, cutting the plants near the stalks, my grandfather teaching to gauge the thickness of the stalks, to look for the hint of red, to smell the rich earth, to get it under your nails and feel it there when you are at the table, to feel it there even in your sleep, to breathe the smells of soil and moisture, of aphids and green leaves like elephant ears. He teaches me about timing and discernment, teaches me to know when the plants are ready to be cut, to know which to keep and which to discard. The two days we spent harvesting were not enough. There was simply too much rhubarb for us to manage, so we left the uncut stalks to bolt.
It is April, and I am nineteen years old. I have just completed my first year of college and am preparing to leave on a two-year Mormon mission in the fall. I have a job lined up in Boise, but it won’t start until early June, leaving me six weeks without definite plans. I know that the family is worried about grandpa’s body and grandma’s mind, and I also knew that there was no way grandpa is going to let someone come in to “take care of” either of them. I know I will be leaving soon and do not expect that either of my grandparents will be alive to greet me on my return, so I ask grandpa if I can come down and work for him until my job starts in Boise. When I was in high school I worked a summer for grandpa with my best friend, and I know that he counts me among the hard-working grandchildren (forever after I was regaled, especially from Eve, with stories of some of the lazier cousins who had preceded me, and for some unknown reason, seemed to have hated digging ditches, pouring concrete, and weeding large tracts of soil for long hours and meager pay). I pitch my idea to him as something he can do to help me, by giving me a job to help me earn money for my mission. It is a request he cannot refuse. In this innocuous way I become a kind of live-in assistant, preparing meals, keeping the house clean, working to keep the place up, and providing some company for the two of them.
* * *
Grandpa’s place is called Sompaddu. This is an acronym, a name which had been meant to stand for Sarah Owens Mortensen’s Place At Dimple Dell Utah. Sarah Owens Mortensen died while Sompaddu was still undeveloped land, before she could see the blackberries bear fruit or taste the almost wild pears in the sprawling orchards Grandpa had planted. She had a brain tumor. She was forty nine years old. She had nine children. Grandpa married Eve a few years afterwards, and the two of them decided to keep the project going, tweaking the name slightly so that it became Still Our Mortensen Place At Dimple Dell, Utah. Sompaddu sits on a little more than six acres at the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon in Sandy, Utah. When grandpa bought the place, by all accounts it looked pretty scraggly. The property was thinly covered with scrub oak, juniper, sage brush and a few native box elder trees. It had been the northern third of an old twenty acre homestead, not far from the granite quarry site that had provide the granite used to build the Salt Lake City Temple, and most of the things that still grew there had been planted by its first settlers. The town of Sandy received its name as a backhanded insult from Brigham Young, who thought the title a good warning for potential farmers as to the quality of the soil.
The soil at grandpa’s place did always seem to be thirsty, and would have looked rather meager and bare if had not been for the massive irrigation projects the Mormons built after settling in the Salt Lake Valley. This irrigation made Sompaddu possible; it kept things alive. Grandpa purchased water rights for a few hours each week, and built a large holding pond at the head of his estate to hold all the water he bought until he was ready to use it. From this pond he had built a system of terraced pools, connected by a thin meandering concrete trough, designed to carry the overflow down from the holding pool to the tree farm several hundred feet below, in the gully. He had also built an inefficient sprinkler system, antiquated and always breaking.
Plants at Sompaddu generally did not burst or erupt into green, as they do in places where vegetation is only barely suppressed by bad weather and always encouraged by sufficient moisture. At Sompaddu things seemed to tentatively creep towards color, by degrees, and so slowly as to be imperceptible. After Spring had definitively taken place, the abundance and brilliance of the vegetation always had the appearance of miraculousness, and the possibility of so much life with so little water seemed wondrous and odd.
While many of grandpa’s neighbors also kept animals, grew gardens, and tended trees, Sompaddu was an anomaly for the sheer volume and variety of flora it harbored. Planting things had been a Mortensen family obsession for several generation. Grandpa’s father, himself the son of a farmer, established and ran the Mount Graham nursery for many years, and later became the first botany professor at what is now Arizona State University. JD’s great-grandfather Morten P. Mortensen, had been a skilled farmer in Denmark. His gift at growing things and his conversion to Mormonism had been both a blessing and a curse to his family, since those two things were largely responsible for his being sent to colonize various desert locales. After bringing him across the Atlantic and into the inhospitable American West, his assignments took him and his family in a steady southerly direction, from Utah eventually down to Mexico, where he died on the north bank of the Casas Grandes River in the Mormon colony of Diaz, Chihuahua. Though they were Mormons descended from European immigrants, both of JD’s parents were born in Mexico, and their families did not cross back over the border until Pancho Villa’s revolution.
Planting and growing things, then, were part of JD’s familial inheritance, and his planting was not limited to desert crops or simple agriculture. He had three acres of thick growth behind the house, shade oaks intermingled with the most delicious of treasures: blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants, pears, crabapples, plums, and peaches. Grandpa also built a large greenhouse which not only housed a swimming pool but was replete with two dozen different tropical and semi-tropical fruits and flowers. I remember spending one snowy Christmas eve doing little more than climbing out of the swimming pool to pull overripe figs from their weary branches, greedily devouring them and then jumping back into the warm water to rinse the sticky sugar from my chin and hands to repeat the whole process when the temptation of the figs again grew strong enough. There were kumquats and lemon trees, a rubber tree even, alongside leafy Polynesian plants, and still others from the Mediterranean, with names I never knew or have forgotten, all sheltered and grown in a leafy tangle in that unlikeliest of places, the harsh western desert. This was the Sompaddu of my childhood, a literal Eden, a place where the desert had been “made to blossom like a rose,” a place that seemed idyllic, Arcadian, a place without death or sadness.
* * *
The room is pale, and summer light comes through old glass windows, warming the air, expanding time, making the whole place feel larger, quickening my pulse. There is a sink made of stainless steel—solid, very deep, I can stick my arms beyond the elbow down into it. I have rich loamy brown underneath my fingernails, can feel the earth dully pressing at the edges of my fingers. There is another window to the left of this sink. It is small, unobtrusive, hung with faded drapes. It gives a view of the interior of the greenhouse, and through it I see a sprawl of green, full of texture and depth and variety. The fig tree is nearest, and though its fruit is just appearing, the large sacred leaves seem to beg you to be pluck them, to sew them together, to make a covering for your grandmother, whose name is Eve and who has Alzheimer’s. Beyond the branches of the fig there is the reflection of water off the silver pipes running beneath the glass paneled ceiling. A ceiling fan spins in languor, methodically, steadily, comforting in its insistence.
There is the strange smell that belongs only to this room, a smell that is all roots and brownness, robust and earthy, with a tang from the rhubarb and a mingling of many other things, citrus leaves, mint, eucalyptus, chlorine, the trace of chemicals that gives a vague burning, that tickle the hairs on my nose without repulsion. My grandfather is beside me, sleeves rolled up to just under his elbows, a solid stony mass—entirely corporeal. His body has also a scent, a memory, and his clothes all have the smell of being lived in. His sweat is not unpleasant, musty and inoffensive. He does not smell like other old people I have known, he smells too alive, too vital, too steady.
Grandpa piles all the leafy stalks in the sink’s left basin, opens a drawer, roots around for a while, finds a knife. Without speaking, he turns to the sink and expertly severs the stalks from the leaves, tossing the leaves into the garbage. He piles the long stalks into the sink’s basin and rinses them, gingerly, one after the other. The light pours and pours through the windows above his head and does not stop. I see the massive veins in his hands, the purple blotches spidering around the tufts of hair, the broad swollenness of his knuckles, the deftness of his thick skilled fingers. When he is done he points to the neatly rinsed pile. “Well,” he says, “what are you waiting for?”
“Nothing,” I say. I am lying. Though I cannot say exactly what I am waiting for, until he speaks I know I am incapable anything. I have not even dared to breathe, so silent have I been, so transported by the spectacle of his labor. Perhaps I was simply waiting for his hands to stop moving.
I walk over in front of the basin and stare at the glistening shafts of rhubarb resting there, waiting for me to cut and soak them. I can see the memory of his hands carved upon each one of them, indelible, insoluble, invisible. I hold the shining silver blade in my hands, bring thick green stalks out of the shallow water, and cut them sharply into thirds. I fill the sink with cold water and leave them to soak. The next day we return to the kitchen and grandpa shows me how to boil the stalks in a sugary solution, shows me how to render the stalks into something you could eat.
This next day I am also foolish enough to I mention that I had noticed he had trouble breathing when he bent cutting stalks the first two days.
“What do you mean, it looked like I couldn’t breathe?”
“Uhh, I don’t know. I just was a little worried, that’s all.”
He lets out a sharp breath of air, hot and fast like a horse’s snort. “I’m still running fine, even if my joints are getting rusty. I just can’t feel my damned fingers anymore, so it takes me a little longer to do things now.”
“I know grandpa. I know.” I am sorry to have spoken, but want to continue. “Why can’t you feel your fingers?”
“I’ve been having a bit of trouble with my spinal column, so my extremities are starting to be less responsive. I can’t feel my fingers or toes much anymore, and if I didn’t check on them every once in a while, I might start to think they’d disappeared.” He says this in a level voice, and then looks at me. He is smiling.
When ever grandpa needs to step over things, which is often, since he lives in a two story house, he takes his two hands, brings them underneath his thigh and manually lifts his leg until it has cleared the obstacle. I have seen him perform this exhausting ritual alone, watched him laboring slowly down the three steps in front of his home from the kitchen window without knowing that I was there. Each time I see it, it feels colossal, heroic, and impossible to bear. I want to ask him about this, about how it feels to lift his own leg over the smallest of steps, but I know that with him such a question would be impossible. Instead I ask about his wife. “How’s grandma doing? I know the last time I was here, she was starting to have a little trouble remembering things.” This is being generous. The last time I saw her we spent an hour trying to remember what an extension cord was, and another hour remembering where she left it.
“You know, a lot of the children are starting to think that I should start looking for a home for Eve. She’s started losing her mind, you know, and they think it’s getting to the point where it might be dangerous to keep her in the house.”
“Well, what do you think?”
He snorts again, his head twitching quickly to the left, as if he had just felt a fly land on the top of his head. “I think that they don’t know what they’re talking about. She’ll be just fine here.”
He pauses for a beat, and then says, “Well, we better get the rest of this stuff up to a boil.” He chuckles. “Looks like we’ll have enough rhubarb to last us the next twenty years.”
Even though there is a lot of rhubarb, twenty years sounds too impossible to be true. I nod and fall silent, thinking about the time that is passing between us, hoping that the rhubarb at least will last him two. I can tell his heart is not really in what he has said and that phrases are more the product of habit than of conviction. I do not press him further.
* * *
I was to discover his way of speaking about his failing body always followed the same evasive patterns. When he talked about making the difficult decision to cede some autonomy, admit his growing weakness, or ask for assistance, he would do two things: shift the conversation to Eve’s health problems and tell me what “they” thought needed to happen. It was always his children who worried that maybe he couldn’t handle everything anymore, or who thought grandma might need professional care. He thought if he just kept going, kept waking up each morning at five and going about his work, maybe things would stay just the way they are, maybe they wouldn’t get any better, but they wouldn’t be getting any worse either. But they, they thought he should slow down. They were worried about the two of them alone in such a big house, they were concerned there might be some kind of accident.
And they had good reason to be concerned. Grandpa was driven by the power of his habits and routines almost to the point of recklessness. Earlier that spring while working alone, he had fainted and spent four unconscious hours on his face, surrounded only by two swans pecking nonchalantly at the mound of spilled feed around him. When he came to, he discovered that the fingers of his left hand had formed a kind of claw, and that his hand was still clutching tightly the tin can he had been carrying. He had to pry these lifeless fingers off the can with his other hand, and then spent the rest of the day massaging his hand back into its usual shape. A couple of weeks later he tripped while trying to step over a small ledge, fell and bruised himself badly. Then he fainted again and lay under the shade of a large box elder tree for about an hour, until one of the gardeners found him. When news of these events reached his children, a conference of sorts was called. I made the hour drive from my dorm to be there.
When I arrived, I found a group of my aunts and uncles pitched in a conspiratorial circle. My mother was speaking to my uncle Glenn, a doctor, “I don’t care if I am the only one who’ll say it. The last time was the third time it has happened already this year. Glenn, this is serious—who knows what might have happened if Theophilus hadn’t found him the last time. You’re a doctor. If he were your patient instead of your father, wouldn’t you intervene? All I’m trying to say is that if dad won’t, we’re going to have to do something. At least talk to him about slowing down.”
“Patti, it doesn’t matter what I say. I’m just his son. I think all of us know Dad well enough to know that he’s not going to do something just because someone tells him to. He’s going to do what he wants to do. That’s just how he is.”
“But Glenn, aren’t you worried about him?” She was gasping now and in my mother’s voice I could hear tears gathering and I imagined her crying as she stood over her mother’s sick bed at age eleven, trying to help her to adjust her wig, trying to help her look right, trying to help her stay awake, trying to help her stop dying.
Glenn seemed to sense that answering would have been futile. There was a long silence and finally my mother whispered, in a near sob, “Don’t all of you realize that he could have died?”
Grandpa was close enough to hear all of this. He was sitting in the blue recliner, his usual place, and, since this was the usual time, was rustling through the paper, sighing at all the usual times. Just before she finished, he grunted unusually loud and got up from the chair. The paper fell noisily to his side. We did not see him again for more than two hours. After everyone else had left, he told me that he had remembered he needed to check on the blackberries.
My grandfather was born in 1920 and grew up in an era in which greatness and industry were hard to separate. By industry I mean purposeful activity, constructive work. He was a model of dedicated labor, a tireless worker and a man of resolute and steadfast habits. He awoke at five o’clock each morning and worked until breakfast in his orchards or on his grounds. After breakfast he put in a full day at the laboratory or at the hospital (he was a pioneering heart and lung surgeon, teacher, and inventor), returned for dinner, and would then pass the evening engaged in some other kind of work. He had always been this way. This is why, when it came time to build the greenhouse and dig out a swimming pool, he had not simply contracted the labor out to strangers. Rather, he and his sons had dug out the space for the pool themselves—filling shovel after shovel, wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow, until the hole was large enough, and grandpa let them stop.
Somewhere, I think there is a photograph proving this. Grandpa took it. My uncle Spence stands neck deep in a hole stretching at least 20 yards long and half as wide. He is resting on his shovel, shirtless. Everything about his posture at this moment seams to speak of leisure and repose, like Whitman on the frontispiece to Leaves of Grass, but the rest of him speaks of something altogether different, of real work. His face is beaded with sweat, and his whole body is glistening bronze—taut, lithe, young. Another brother is half in/half out of the frame behind him, caught leaping down into the back of the pit. He wears old jeans and adidas sneakers (though blurry, there are still three black stripes). The tightness of the jeans is excruciating—it makes the thin legs appear phenomenally long, as if the frame could be stretched another ten feet and still not capture (enclose) the sunlight streaming through them, not see the golden halo as the summer sun backlights his grin, his bronzed cheeks, his blazing-white teeth, his legs so long that no matter how wide a lens you chose, you’d still be sure not quite ever to reach the rest of him, to catch and recognize the face. This anonymous background figure intrigues me, pulling me to the photograph again and again. The mysterious flying legs. The adidas suspended eternally in descent, ungrounded. The too-tight battered jeans (no doubt long since decomposed). It is likely that nothing of this person that was visible in the picture exists at this present time, that the markers that one sees here have been obliterated, erased, casually discarded, that this figure will remain forever unrecognizable.
What remained was the impetus that made such a photograph possible, the relentless need for labor that drove and shaped my grandfather’s life. After I arrived, he started to scale back his manual labor, turning over to me (with a grudging reluctance he made little effort to conceal) most of the “outdoor work”. In its place, he began devoting himself more frequently to what he called his “old man projects,” which consisted of writing his own personal history as well as smaller biographies for his mother, his deceased first wife (Sarah), and his current wife (Eve). He kept his voluminous records in a small pantry downstairs, where he would work, surrounded by musty documents and yellowing parchment, aided only by a single lamp, desk, and uncomfortable chair.
Go and see him there.
Lift your feet carefully on each creaking step of the stairs. Wait at the end of the hall until your breathing is sufficiently stilled. Through the almost-closed door, see him sitting solidly in his chair, see the back of his head shining with reflected light, see his face turned away from you. Notice how spartan he keeps things, how bare the walls. There is only one photograph in all the room. Squint to see it on the desk. Hear the slow steady rattle of his breathing. Wonder if he is sleeping or awake. Decide that there is something sacred about his severe posture, about the heavy pen he grips tightly in his right hand, about everything you see, about all of it, and shut your eyes. Pretend that you are not crying. Feel your breath coming and going. Notice how slow it is. Creep back upstairs and wait until he has finished his work to talk to him about the following day’s plans.
Is it necessary for me to say that the photograph is of Sarah, his first wife, and that in the picture she does not yet have cancer, that in the picture she is even smiling?
* * *
After making three bowls of Cream of Wheat, lavishly buttering four slices of toast and pulling out a glass gallon pitcher of half and half from Winder Dairy, I invite my grandparents to the table. Before sitting down, my grandmother looks out the window at the enormous thermometer that hangs from the fence surrounding the tennis court. The thermometer has a large red hand that works with only spotty reliability and a face laid out like a clock, with 50 degrees equaling noon. Because she rarely ventures out of doors, she relies on the broken thermometer to inform her of the wider world beyond. In process of this consultation, she sees tiny brown things climbing on the fence, glancing furtively at her, darting quickly across the lawn. This sets her off suddenly, inexplicably. “JD, come here!” she says. “Ooooh. Oh no! Those…things are back. JD, look at those bad little guys. What is he doing out there? JD, you need to go out there right now and get rid of them. We don’t want those bad little guys out there.”
She does recognize them. They are squirrels.
The first time it happens Grandpa and I laugh. “Grandma,” I say, “don’t get all excited. There’s nothing to worry about. They’re just squirrels. They’re not doing anything wrong. It’s OK. They won’t hurt anybody.”
She remains standing, her eyes fixed at the window, her face darkening into a scowl. “I don’t care what they are, I don’t want them running around out there. JD, I want you to get rid of them. They shouldn’t be doing that.”
JD shakes his head. “Doing what, Eve?”
“That!” You can see the italics as she pronounces the word. She glares at both of us. We lower our eyes. I am biting my lip to keep from laughing out loud. When she looks back out the window they are gone.
When it happens the next day, I don’t have to bite my lip quite as hard. When it happens again the day after that, I do not even smile. And when it begins to happen every day, I start closing the blinds before I even set the table. We begin eating lunch, at noon, with the blinds down and the kitchen light on, to spare my grandmother the agitation of seeing those little brown things she remembers but does not recognize. With the shades drawn she no longer knows the temperature, how warm it is, how dry, how purple the mountains appear when the sun strikes them just so. With the shades drawn she also does not see the unharvested rhubarb turning to flower, hollowing out and growing useless.
* * *
My grandmother was inordinately fond of poodles. So ubiquitous were they, so closely linked were grandma and these tiny dogs, that it would impossible to convince a family member of the truth of any story involving Eve that did not also prominently feature her poodles. They were almost extensions of her person, and the miniscule pattering sounds of neatly trimmed claws against linoleum served throughout the house as the most reliable indicators of grandma’s presence. There had always been two tiny dogs that served as her advance guard—two willing sycophants with ferociously bad haircuts. As long as I could remember, they had always been the same two—Lily, the smiling blond haired one (who bore an uncanny resemblance to Pat O’Brien), and Maggie, the grey serious one (with a perm reminiscent of rural Ohioan newscasters). Arriving that summer, I was stunned to learn that Lily was dead and Maggie, recently crippled by arthritis and severe cataracts, seemed near death.
* * *
There are a series of seventeenth century paintings which share the curious title of Et in Arcadia Ego. These paintings have some common features: they are set in Arcadia, they feature shepherds, and they disrupt the idyllic pastoral paradise heroicized in Virgil’s Eclogues by introducing the presence of death. In some, shepherds are shown observing a human skull, in other they encounter a tomb with the words Et in Arcadia Ego inscribed upon it as an epitaph. This epitaph, most commonly translated as “I am also in Arcadia” or “I am even in Arcadia,” gives the lie to dreams of Arcadian immortality, reminding its beholder that death is unavoidable. These paintings are just one example of the larger genre of memento mori, objects or artifacts designed to remind their beholder of their own mortality, to confront them with the inevitability of their own non-negotiable deaths. The passing of the poodles functioned the way I imaged the grave with the mysterious inscription must have for the careless shepherds. It was the most undeniable of memento mori, proof that things in my grandparents’ house were falling apart, that my grandparents might not be able to hold back the forces of entropy and decay forever. It was something I should have seen, since Sompaddu itself was a kind of memorial space, a place whose name itself more the traces of unexpected death. Discovering that Lily had died should not have unfolded so unexpected and profound a revelation to me—but it did. It was as if I were leaning against that Arcadian tomb, reading the inscription for the first time. “I am even in Arcadia,” it says.
* * *
Shortly after Lily died my grandfather bought Eve a replacement—Blue Orchid. Grandma called her Orky, and Orky was hopelessly, comically without discipline. One consequence of her indiscipline was that another of my tasks became soaking up puddles of urine with sponges and trying to scrape tiny piles of dog excrement out of ancient carpet. Orky’s lack of discipline was to be expected however, since my grandmother doted shamelessly on her poodles, spoiling them with such extravagance that I was simultaneously repulsed and jealous. She would make—from scratch—waffles, delicious waffles, blueberry waffles, slathered them with butter and the finest imported Canadian syrups and then cut them into poodle-sized pieces. Then she would call the dogs in a piercing warble.
“OR-KEEE!!! MAH-GEEE!!!”
That was all they needed. The dogs would come trotting in with that gait, peculiar to poodles, that connotes both luxury and consciousness of great privilege. To my astonishment, Grandma would take them into her lap, one after the other, and feed them with her fingers, until the waffles were gone. After they had finished and grandma had rinsed her sticky hands, if she had any energy left she’d pop a couple of Eggos in the toaster and we’d eat. Otherwise, I’d be left to scrape together some leftovers or prepare a whole new batch of batter for our breakfast.
Despite my grandmother’s benevolence, Orky’s lack of discipline could also be diagnosed by her insufficient gratitude. For one thing, unlike her predecessors, she didn’t follow grandma around everywhere. Instead, Orky curled up on the living room floor next to Maggie, who lay motionless, sleeping off her pain, hoping to conserve energy, trying to die a little more slowly, laboring to make it to the next batch of waffles. This meant that Grandma was left to herself in her wanderings, which meant she could move through the house unannounced, which meant she could surprise people, which meant she could become lost. And if she got lost, how could you find her without her poodles? How could you even recognize her?
* * *
It’s hard to tell you this so freely, but we didn’t completely mind grandma’s dementia. You’d think we would have, but we didn’t. Losing her mind made grandma nicer to be around. I think I can speak safely for all her grandchildren, no, for all children everywhere, that we had been completely and utterly terrified of Grandma Eve. If there was anyone that I have known that would have loved feudalism, it was my grandmother. She was the perfect lady of the manor—prickly, harsh, mercurial, and capricious, but not without a certain dignity, an insistent pretension to grace and refinement. I had a special reason to dislike her because she made it very clear that Sarah was her favorite grandchild. This would not be such a bad thing, except that Sarah is my sister, younger by less than two years. When my grandmother was present, my fights with my sister were always resolved in her favor. Sarah was not unaware of this, and responded by pushing her immunity to unbearable limits.
When we visited Grandma and Grandpa Mortensen, I spent as much as time as possible outdoors, the place where Grandpa ruled, for no other reason than to avoid the especially dangerous combination of my grandmother and younger sister. As I grew older, I realized I was not alone in this. Nearly everyone tried to avoid Eve and seemed not to like her, except for Sarah and somehow, grandpa. My grandfather had married Eve when my mother was thirteen years old, two years after my grandfather’s first wife died of cancer. For children, the sheer audacity of trying to replace a natural mother is enough to jaundice all stepmothers, but Grandpa Eve’s personality had done little to increase her popularity. I was old enough now that I no longer feared her as I once had, but she remained for me (as for many others in the family) the kind of figure who is to be respected but not loved. But when Alzheimer’s started robbing her of her mind, her personality also started to change, and Eve became jubilant, childlike, delightful.
I imagined what I saw was the young Eve Tanner, daughter of Margaret Harriet “Hattie” Douglas and Valison “Val” Tanner Jr., the girl who was born during the depression to a ranching family fortunate enough to own the land they lived on, the girl who used to make the rounds with daddy rounding up strays, the girl daddy called “Jeeps,” for reasons long forgotten. I saw my grandma young again, saw the wild-eyed country child who loved the smell of her daddy’s sourdough biscuits, who hated moving off the ranch so the cattle could winter. I saw the girl who spent the snowy months dreaming of sago lilies, Indian paintbrushes, and wild chokecherries, who grew up doing everything the old-fashioned way, without electricity or machinery, without air-conditioning or much comfort. I imagined her going up to the two lone cedar trees that grew on the hillside above the ranch house, wearing her mother’s satin-collar dress and pretending she was an elegant lady, preserving the pleasing illusion until one of the pigs she kept would sneak into the plowed ground and she’d have to run after him in her unsteady heels, the long green-crepe train flowing after her. I saw my grandmother before she married Bob Davis, before he was drafted for Korea, before he decided to stay in the service after the armistice, before they transferred him to Florida, to Texas, to New York, to Germany, to Thailand, before they flew him into combat in the skies over Vietnam, before told her that he was through with being her husband, before she moved to Salt Lake City, almost forty, with a teenage daughter and no employable skills, before she found a job and place to live, before she met JD, before they married, before, before, before.
Of course this was not really possible; I was not actually seeing my grandmother made young again, so it feels especially cruel to admit that the same illness that was eradicating my grandmother’s established identity seemed to be replacing her with a person that I much preferred. Despite the softening of personality, Alzheimer’s is a hellish disease, terrible for many of the same reasons as totalitarianism. Each is calculated to destroy human dignity, to gradually dismantle the individual, to strip the subjective ‘I’ of its unique identity. The product of Alzheimer’s and the death camps have at least one thing in common: at the end, their complete victims are human beings that have been unmade, reduced to a state of animated death. The victims of both are fashioned into Gorgons, upon which it is impossible to look upon without petrifaction. Unlike totalitarianism, however, dementia hides its insidiousness under the façade of a benign befuddlement, is an affliction that makes its victims seem little more than gentle fools, harmless, helpless old folks who elicit little more than a chuckle or two from us. It is something that makes us suppress a laugh when we think: silly grandma, that’s not where the toaster goes, or silly grandma, I asked you to bring me an extension cord, not your curling iron, or silly grandma, how did you manage to lock yourself in the bedroom closet again?
Alzheimer’s is a gradual and partial encroachment, a disease which manifesting itself only occasionally at first, gradually appearing and then subsiding. In its early stages, the victim is afflicted not only by the disease, but by long stretches of awful lucidity, in which they comprehend their situation and inescapable fate. Alzheimer’s strikes indiscriminately, showing a preference only for age, and produces a wrenching mixture of comedy and tragedy, of humor and pathos. Alzheimer’s is an entropic disaster, a vampiric undoing, a thief careful enough to sweep clean its tracks, so discreet it wipes smooth its fingerprints even as its robbing you. Alzheimer’s hollows out its victims, stealing memories and habits but leaving bodies empty, useless stalks. When I read of death camps, the production of corpses, and of the Muselmann in Auschwitz, I think of mobile iterations of my grandmother.
Even as I write this, my grandmother is still alive. Sort of. She has not had any lucid episodes for several years now, and is entirely helpless and incapacitated. She sleeps in a nursing home in Ogden, Utah, where she shares a room with another decrepit old woman. Their living space, their sheets, their clothing, their bodies all reek of urine. She trembles constantly, almost imperceptibly, and fixes her gaze upon objects for long stretches, saying nothing as her eyes dance without really moving. She does almost nothing on her own.
Go and visit her.
First, take one of the large Q-tips they keep on a table beside her bed, and dip it into a glass of water. Rub it over her lips, try to keep them moist, try to stop them from cracking and bleeding. Do this because you love her, because you don’t know what else to do, because it hurts you to see her lips parted and cracked, because she cannot tell you what else to do, because she cannot tell you where she hurts, where she wants to be scratched, where she is right now. Speak to her, call her by name, tell her who we are and how she used to know you.
Lean over her body and kiss her on the forehead. Watch as her eyes struggle up to meet your face, and feel your eyes fill up with tears. Notice how even after you withdraw, her eyes remained fixed in the same place, as if you are only a ghost, as if you haven’t even bothered to come. Wonder what it is she sees. Follow her gaze. See the two images which have been hung upon her wall. One the painting of the small house she grew up in near Grouse Creek, Utah, a tiny ranching community next to the Nevada border. See her own name painted into the bottom right corner by a hand that looks so steady, so bold that you know it cannot be this woman’s hand, this woman who shakes and shakes and doesn’t stop.
Look beside it and see the photograph. Notice how she is smiling. Notice JD’s solid face, the corners of his mouth upturned just slightly, a stoic and a gentle smile. Look at these two faces, faces that you remember but cannot recognize. Watch the images blur so completely that nothing can be seen clearly anymore. Turn away. Murmur something to Eve, quietly, promise to come see her again soon. Retreat slowly from the room, walking backwards. At last glance, her gaze has not shifted.