Alzheimer's: A Slipping Away

Erika Dyck, an Associate Professor in the Department of History, University of Saskatchewan, wrote this poem 25 years ago, while in grade 7 about her Grandmother. Thank you Erika for sharing this beautiful poem with us!

It is like a living death, 

takes the mind and leaves the breath.

The body is there for all to see,  

floundering without memory.

First, just harmless forgetfulness,

then soon grandma needs help to dress.

Tasks once handled with such ease,

are beyond reach for those diseased.

Household chores are out of hand,

constant care is in demand.

Close companions come and go,

who they are, she doesn’t know.

Those left behind as the memory goes,

believe they can cope with the status quo.

But the reality is, they cannot face,

a disease that progresses at such a pace.

The confusion she feels is never lost,

only shared by others at great cost.

Communication, now on another plane,

my sorrow for her is hard to contain.

How could nature be so callous,

to condemn someone who had no malice.

Who’s next, who will it be,

mom, dad or perhaps me?

Erika reflects 25 years later on the poem and her experience with her Grandmother's Alzheimer's disease....

My grandmother died when I was in grade seven.  I had the good fortune of spending a lot of time with her as a child. She cared for me when my mom returned to work after each of my siblings was born and I have strong and very fond memories of happy times, like playing cards and Hi-Q with her.  We often spent time exploring outside in the large garden full of fruit trees and the large compost pile that we fed regularly.  We played in the kitchen too; Grandma making meals and me making a mess.  I don’t have a distinct memory of her getting sick.  I just remember little things.  We used to sort the garbage each week, which was a ritual my grandmother had acquired after living through the Depression and saving anything remotely useful.  We carefully smoothed out wax paper wrappers, tin foil scraps, and sorted items that could be burned or composted from the few things that truly needed to be placed in the landfill.  But the weekly rituals became more confusing, I now realize in hindsight.  Over time the sorting sessions took longer and longer and seemed to have no real end goal.  Items would move from one pile to another and back as she lost the thread.  As a kid though, I didn’t notice, I liked playing with my Grandma.

As I got older and started school I continued to spend time with my grandparents.  Grandma had always talked to me about my lessons and always appeared to have time to work in a game of cards while we discussed the day’s events.  But that too became more difficult over time.  I got busy and noticed less, but she seemed more and more distracted.

My cousins visited too.  There would be loads of us kids running through the house or chasing each other across the street at the school yard.  We would take over the entire house setting up train tracks with impossibly long and winding routes.  Grandma would quietly watch us destroy her house and she sometimes slipped into the background.  She seemed quite tired often.

In grade seven I was chosen among my classmates for a lead role in the school play.  I had to practice daily as we prepared for several shows in the spring.  By then Grandma barely recognized us, and no longer knew her own children or my Grandfather.  We visited her each day after school, but the visits were hard.  My mom kept a porcelain rabbit with hard candies filled in my Grandma’s room.  I used to feel angry that I thought my younger siblings only visited to get the humbug candies she kept in that rabbit.  My Grandma would sit or pace in her room, and couldn’t even express herself or describe her far away thoughts. She lost weight.  Her eyes seemed to change from blue to grey.  My heart aches now remembering those days.  Her eyes often seemed very far away, though they remained kind and searching.  She was in there, but there was somewhere else.

My Grandma died just before our school performance.  The funeral was set for the opening night.  Everything is now a blur to me.  I can’t even remember the faces of my distant cousins who traveled to pay their respects.  I certainly don’t remember any of the lines from the play.  I remember my Grandfather listening to Mozart’s requiem for days, loudly, on repeat.  My father and his brothers went quiet. 

Although her death was merely the end of a long slipping away, it created a hole in our family that had long been developing.  She had kept things together and had a calming influence on those of us around her, even through her time with Alzheimer’s.  I feel extremely lucky to have known her on both sides of the disease.  My cousins and siblings ask from time to time about my memories of her, and I feel honoured to have them to share.  I hope that my memories and reflections can afford her the dignity that she deserved, even as she wrestled to hold on to her own thoughts.

I have recently become a mother, which has encouraged me to reflect on family in new ways.  Memories of my Grandma’s kindness, her gentle nature, and her strong intelligence have come back to me as I struggle to keep my patience as my toddler draws on the walls or builds towers with my spice collection on his sister.  My Grandma never yelled to my recollection, yet she raised four boys and had grandchildren under her feet in most of my days with her.  I think of her strength and imagine her patience as I come to face my own trials as a parent and a partner.  I know that many people think I didn’t really know my grandmother; that her illness had taken hold already when I was young.  I’ll never really know whether that is true, but I like to believe that I learned a lot from her, and still am.