A Five-Year-Old Teaches A Lesson In Grace

On the night the author loses patience with her mother and her dementia, a granddaughter’s love unites them all

- Leslie Kendall Dye

IT’S EIGHT O’CLOCK on a cold spring night. Our apartment has been hit by a cyclone—the handiwork of a young, energetic child. Every bit of furniture is draped with paper chains, scissors and Scotch tape, modeling clay, piles of acorns, and party favors.

I’m so tired tonight. I’ve been on crutches for seven weeks, recovering from hip surgery, and I’m trying fruitlessly to clean up.

The phone rings—for the sixth time in less than an hour. We know who it is.

When my mother was 68, a hemorrhagic stroke claimed her brain, but not her life. She awoke from a coma severely damaged; the bleed instantly razed the landscape of her mind. Dementia soon built a Gothic fun house of distortions where coherent architecture had once stood. She has been manacled inside for a decade, with little to do but experience psychic distress.

She is dogged by paranoia—she thinks she has been kicked out of her assisted living facility (not true), she thinks her daughters have not visited in months (it has been a few days), she thinks that her friend Jimmy never wants to see her again (he calls and visits weekly).

Each time she calls, I play a game with myself called “How Good a Person Can I Be?” I’ve won five rounds of the game tonight; I am due for a fall.

She has no idea that she has repeated the things she is about to say a million times today and a million times yesterday. She has no idea that I had surgery, nor can she recall her own granddaughter’s name. She is unaware of most of the past, and she drifts in the present. She is lonely.