(Note: I shall
be referring to my husband as H to protect his privacy just a teensy bit.)
Despite myself,
I still somehow manage to get things accomplished on my bucket list. Like crossing off three states from my bucket
list!
8. Delaware
9. Georgia
11. Hawaii
12. Idaho
13. Illinois
15. Iowa
16. Kansas
18. Louisiana
19. Maine
Since I haven’t
mentioned it before, my rule for crossing off states is either I must live in
them or specifically visit them. No
layovers or hours of driving through. (I’m
looking at you, Georgia!) Kentucky was
easy to cross off because I live here.
And the Indiana trip is a story for another day. So: Florida.
I chose to make
2. Visit Every State part of my
bucket list, because I really wanted (and still want) to see the change in
flora and fauna. I love how living in a
large country provides massively diverse landscapes. But I wasn’t going to Florida to view
landscapes; I was going to visit family.
The idea of
going on this trip caused me a bit of anxiety.
You see, we were going to visit H’s grandmother and her husband. H’s grandmother is a wonderful person, and so
is, I imagine, her husband. But he has
Alzheimer’s. I’m not ashamed to say that
the prospect of spending a week with them made me uneasy simply because of that
fact. The truth is my own grandmother
had Alzheimer’s or dementia or a series of small strokes (the doctors never
were too clear), and I knew how heart-breaking and cruel a disease it could be. And since she had died in December, I wasn’t
looking forward to dealing with it again so soon.
When we got
there, my fears weren’t assuaged. H’s step-grandfather
acted basically how I expected. He didn’t
know the house we were in was the house he lived in. He didn’t recognize H’s family, even though
he’d been a part of it for nearly 25 years.
And worst of all, most of the time he didn’t even know that H’s
grandmother was his wife. (A few times he
said I looked like his daughter, but he doesn’t even have any daughters.) It made me sad, and my heart broke for H’s
grandmother. How could she live like
this day in and day out?
H’s grandmother
is quite the cheerful personality, and whether or not she actually feels
cheerful, she radiates it just the same.
I was baffled as to how she could deal.
But then one day, I started looking at all of her photo albums. (She’s basically scrapbooked since
1982.) I really love looking at
pictures. It’s more fun if I know the
people in them, but I don’t have to. And
the older the better! As I was looking
through them, I started seeing lots of pictures of her and her husband, and I
thought, “Oh no, this is just going to make me even more upset, seeing them
before his Alzheimer’s.” And for a while
it did upset me. But as I kept looking
at the pictures, something changed. For
some reason, seeing that she and her husband had had this whole life together
before the Alzheimer’s really comforted me.
I don’t know if
I’ll ever completely know why seeing the photographs reassured me. But I think the fact that they had this
entire life and love together before Alzheimer’s, and that not even the
Alzheimer’s could change that past had something to do with it. I’ve had this idea in my head that who you
are is determined by how you are when you die.
If you’re successful when you die, then you die a success. If you were successful, but then towards the
end of your life you had a failed comeback or something, then you die a
failure. If you die with Alzheimer’s,
then you die tragically. I’m not sure I
think that anymore. Yes, H’s
step-grandfather’s disease is ugly, twisted, and just plain mean. But that doesn’t change how many people loved
him, were loved by him, and still love him.
Even if he can’t remember.
 |
| H and his step-grandfather waving to neighbors. |
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