work in progress.
Once when I was nine, my grandfather watched me write in my journal and he told me that he wished he’d done that when he was young. Toward the end of his lucidity, he started to write his autobiography, something to leave his children and grandchildren, in an attempt to capture everything he wanted us to know. He stopped writing on the fourth chapter, which was about his time serving in the US Navy. Now he has a difficult time remembering who I am.
Eighty-three now, my grandfather, Joseph Kirk, has compiled an impressive resume of different roles and services, different things he’s been to different people. He is the father of six children, the loving husband of my grandmother Margie Jean. He was active in the Lions Club, the Rotary Club, his children’s schools and sports. He was a reporter and a professor. He was a best friend to Vern, and after Vern’s wife died, it was my grandfather who sat with him. He worked with telephones, he volunteered with special-needs children. But none of that mattered to me, really – he was just Grandpa; the one who took us camping and teased me when I went to his house. Once when I was going through my father’s football scrapbooks I came across a letter Grandpa wrote my dad the night my father’s team was unfairly disqualified from the league championships. In it, he offered consolation for the loss and pointed out qualities he’d noticed in my dad during the season. That he’d never missed practice, for instance, or that he attended Mass faithfully despite having early Saturday morning and Sunday evening practices. The letter made me cry, and it forced me for the first time to see Grandpa in another role than the one in which I knew him.
My grandfather grew up on a small island off the Washington coast, where his family milked their own cows and where he walked up and down a formidable hill each day to get to school – four miles, round trip, yard-deep snow in the winter, he claimed, although later when my aunts visited his birthplace they came back roaring with laughter, describing a small hump in the road, a mere bump on the pathway, a quarter mile between his home and the site of the old schoolhouse.
My grandparents live now in Cupertino, home of engineers and start-up CEOS, the state’s second-best public high school, and Apple – ten minutes from my family. He loved to garden, my grandfather, and when I walked around the back of the house there were always strawberries or roses or pumpkins I could pick and show off, to display as if they were my own. I believe he is the only resident of Cupertino who ever grew his own corn and beans.
For my seventh birthday, Grandpa got me an azalea plant. It hadn’t bloomed yet, and I took the pot out of the gift bag and was disappointed at the plain green leaves. He laughed at me. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s an azalea,” he said. “You said you liked it when you went walking with me last week. I’ll come over and we’ll find a place in your yard you can put it, and then you’ll have your very own plant.”
The following Saturday he came over armed with a shovel, whose point I slammed into the ground to the point of blisters, softening the dirt, while he watched. “This hurts,” I said, and he said, “Imagine doing that to a whole farm.” Sunday he brought fertilizer and a watering can, and on Wednesday the soil was soft enough to plant.
My azalea bloomed in less than a week, explosions of pink against the rich leaves, and then deer came and systematically ate every single bloom and bud, leaving just stems. I cried when I woke up and saw what had happened, and my grandfather glared in the direction of our creek and muttered something about garden pests. “It wasn’t your fault,” he assured me.
That summer he tried again, this time with a zucchini – the one plant guaranteed to reproduce beyond any gardener’s desire, filling plots with huge green fruits. Once again I tilled the dirt until my palms ached, fertilized patiently, and then planted seeds. Within weeks the plants had sprouted and grown to what I considered epic proportions, and I called him proudly every day to report progress. Soon flowers grew, big soft orange petals, and when they died and fell always tiny zucchini were left behind. I waited anxiously for them to grow, too, and ran outside every morning to watch them get bigger. I poured little bits of sugar water around the plants, convinced it would help them grow – and then the deer got the zucchini, too. Each time a new flower bloomed and a zucchini formed, it was eaten a few days later.
One day I caught a glimpse of my grandparents’ huge white station wagon backing out of our driveway, and I jumped up. “Is Grandpa here?” I asked my parents. They exchanged quick glances and said, “Oh, he was just giving Dad some tools.”
That night I got a phone call. “Your plants looked pretty good!” Grandpa said. “You’re sure doing a good job with them.”
“But there aren’t any zucchini,” I complained.
“Sure there are!” my grandpa protested. “I saw two! You just aren’t looking hard enough. Go look right now.”
I went outside skeptically, but sure enough, when I pushed aside a leaf there were two gorgeous, gigantic zucchini, and I screamed. I picked them up and ran inside to show my parents.
It took me a long time to realize that they hadn’t been attached to the vine and that there was no way my young plant had had enough time to grow such large fruits. My mother baked them for dinner the next night, and everyone raved about what an amazing job I’d done with my garden.
I wish my grandfather could still follow a conversation, because I want to tell him what that was like – discovering what I thought were fruits to my labor; discovering, later, how much he loved me, how much he was rooting for me, wanted to see me happy, wanted me to be proud of myself.
*****
At one of my brother’s baseball game three years ago, my grandparents sat behind me, in the shade, while we cheered for Brett. As we were leaving, my grandfather pointed to a man on the other side of the bleachers, stood up and said something to my grandmother. I only heard her end of the conversation:
“No, it isn’t,” she said, and then louder, “It isn’t.” He said something else, and she turned away, her eyes closed. “Honey,” she said, “That isn’t Vern. Vern’s dead.”
*****
My grandparents enjoyed surprising one another on their birthdays. For Grandma’s seventieth, Grandpa flew in her best friend, Helen, from Washington as a surprise, and called fifty other people. He took Grandma out to dinner for her birthday – which is on Valentine’s Day – and when they got home at eight, we were all waiting inside. The look on her face when we screamed “Surprise!” was priceless, and she cried when she saw Helen.
For my grandmother’s birthday three years ago, when she was seventy-seven, Grandpa gave her two cards, because he forgot about the first one. “Happy sixtieth to the love of my life,” said the second.
*****
My freshman year in high school when I came down with the stomach flu, he was the one I called to take me home, and at that point he was still mostly okay, just a little forgetful. But it was soon after that that things started to change. He took ginkgo pills, but those didn’t do much. He got quieter during the family dinners, and he became more irritable, in tiny ways. For a while it just looked memory loss, standard old age, because it was small things – he’d forget which streets to take during his morning walk, he’d put the juice in the cupboard, he’d forget to be places.
When he was sixteen, he won a driving safety contest, and as his prize he got to take his parents on a trip to New York city. He’s proud of that. On the way there his mother got to stop and visit her sister; it was the last time she saw her alive, and he was the one who enabled that visit, and that means a lot to him. He told me the story when I was ten or eleven, and then, when I got my license when I was seventeen, he asked, “Did I ever tell you about that time I won that driving contest in New York?”
“Let’s hear it,” I said, and he recounted it happily, ending with, “I think I already told you that one.”
But then six or seven months later, when I drove to their house and he was surprised, because he didn’t remember me being old enough to drive, he asked, “Did I ever tell you about the time I won a driving contest in New York?” and I turned away before he could see me cry.
He asked again that night, and once more the next time I saw him.
It’s funny, because now I’d kill to hear him say that again. Now he sits at family dinners, his hands shaking violently – he has Parkinson’s, as well as Alzheimers – doggedly trying to scoop things up with his fork before the shaking knocks them off again. He puts things in his mouth and keeps chewing, forgetting that he’s doing it, so he’s chewing dinner still, not even through his salad, long after the rest of us have finished. My grandmother wipes his mouth for him.
And he doesn’t talk, really, anymore. He’ll answer questions if you ask them, but he has to think about the answers. It’s hardest for me when I walk in and people ask, “Do you know who that is?” and he stares at me, no doubt trying to reconcile the little girl from his memories and the young woman I am now, before he says, “Kelly,” and everyone agrees enthusiastically – as though it’s a triumph. We do that, all of us – we keep track of his “progress.” This summer I went to visit him when my grandma was gone and Maureen was staying with him. “Come play Scrabble with us!” Maureen said on the phone. And so I went, skeptical but hopeful. And when I got there, he was playing – not quickly, and the rules were too difficult for him, where you can put tiles and where you can’t, but when he saw an R, a U a T and an N on his rack he slowly, shakingly lifted them up to spell out “TURN,” and we clapped. It filled me with hope, made me think that maybe his mind was still working better than any of us thought, maybe he could still understand us – but that’s ridiculous, and I know it. There’s no point being excited when he can still do little things like spell, because he’s not going to get better. He is simply going to get worse and worse, less and less the man he used to be, less and less a man at all, and then he will die.
*****
Last year I called home on Valentine’s Day to wish my grandmother a happy birthday. The whole clan was at my aunt Maureen’s house, and they passed the phone around so I could say hi to everyone. My grandfather got it last. “Hi!” I said, my voice too bright, too cheery, and I hate myself for doing that every time I talk to him, pretending that everything’s better than fine.
“Hello,” he says.
I say, “How are you?”
“Good.”
There’s a pause. Then I hear, muffled, him asking someone in the background, “What do I say now?” and my aunt Annette’s voice, “Tell her what you got for Grandma.”
“Flowers,” he says into the phone.
“That’s perfect,” I tell him. “She loves flowers.” I wipe my eyes. “So is everyone there, Grandpa? Everyone but me?”
Another pause, and then I hear him ask, “Is everyone here?”
“Everyone but Chris,” Annette says, and my grandfather says, “Yes.”
“How was dinner? Was it good?” I ask, and he doesn’t say anything. This must be exhausting for him.
I listen to him breathing for a while. “I love you,” I say, finally, but I can’t tell if he’s still listening.
When I hang up I’m crying openly, and my roommate asks what’s wrong. I smile through my tears and wipe my eyes roughly. “Just talking to my grandpa,” I say. “He has Alzheimers, and it’s really hard.”
“You must have loved him so much,” she says, sympathetically, and in that moment I am filled with anger. I hate her for the past tense.
****
Each morning Grandpa used to go walking. He’d get up early, five or six, and wander around. Now a sign above the front door, in Grandma’s shaky script, reads “REMEMBER: DON’T WALK ANYWHERE,” the whole thing underlined twice. Sometimes he slipped past it, and then didn’t come home. Grandma summoned search parties. She’s too old for that. And we cruised the streets looking for him, a heavy old man in plaid flannel, wondering whether he knew he was lost.
Now the sign doesn’t matter; he doesn’t walk anywhere except downstairs to the kitchen, where he eats and watches TV, and then back upstairs to go to sleep. My grandmother lives around him, loving him fiercely, her love evident in the mundane: how she cooks for him, bathes him, dresses him, wipes his face after each meal. She is eighty-one. There are days when I believe she is the most beautiful woman in the world, a queen, and I want her to have back her romance with her husband.
But then sometimes I think she does. In sickness and in health, I think, and perhaps this, the last stage, is in its own way romantic; perhaps in her selfless love, in his complete dependency, she is able to give him something she never has before.
Perhaps not. Perhaps it is cruel and terrible, an indignity to him that we see him like this, that he has to struggle to remember our names – and that, I think, is the more likely option. And I hate what this disease has made him become.
But one day, when I was still at school, he drove to my house to put one of his own zucchini in my plant to make me happy. Every summer he took me waterskiing, patiently killing and restarting the boat each time I fell. I don’t remember a single volleyball game of mine or baseball game of my brother’s that he didn’t attend, and for that, it doesn’t matter what he is now.
I want my story, our story, to end happily. It will not; for happiness we must become retrograde; we must live in the past and forget the now. I don’t know how to reconcile myself to that. I keep hoping that in writing, in committing my feelings and my memories to paper, I will heal. I have not.
Perhaps for us, as for him, there will be no healing in this world.
Eighty-three now, my grandfather, Joseph Kirk, has compiled an impressive resume of different roles and services, different things he’s been to different people. He is the father of six children, the loving husband of my grandmother Margie Jean. He was active in the Lions Club, the Rotary Club, his children’s schools and sports. He was a reporter and a professor. He was a best friend to Vern, and after Vern’s wife died, it was my grandfather who sat with him. He worked with telephones, he volunteered with special-needs children. But none of that mattered to me, really – he was just Grandpa; the one who took us camping and teased me when I went to his house. Once when I was going through my father’s football scrapbooks I came across a letter Grandpa wrote my dad the night my father’s team was unfairly disqualified from the league championships. In it, he offered consolation for the loss and pointed out qualities he’d noticed in my dad during the season. That he’d never missed practice, for instance, or that he attended Mass faithfully despite having early Saturday morning and Sunday evening practices. The letter made me cry, and it forced me for the first time to see Grandpa in another role than the one in which I knew him.
My grandfather grew up on a small island off the Washington coast, where his family milked their own cows and where he walked up and down a formidable hill each day to get to school – four miles, round trip, yard-deep snow in the winter, he claimed, although later when my aunts visited his birthplace they came back roaring with laughter, describing a small hump in the road, a mere bump on the pathway, a quarter mile between his home and the site of the old schoolhouse.
My grandparents live now in Cupertino, home of engineers and start-up CEOS, the state’s second-best public high school, and Apple – ten minutes from my family. He loved to garden, my grandfather, and when I walked around the back of the house there were always strawberries or roses or pumpkins I could pick and show off, to display as if they were my own. I believe he is the only resident of Cupertino who ever grew his own corn and beans.
For my seventh birthday, Grandpa got me an azalea plant. It hadn’t bloomed yet, and I took the pot out of the gift bag and was disappointed at the plain green leaves. He laughed at me. “Do you know what that is?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s an azalea,” he said. “You said you liked it when you went walking with me last week. I’ll come over and we’ll find a place in your yard you can put it, and then you’ll have your very own plant.”
The following Saturday he came over armed with a shovel, whose point I slammed into the ground to the point of blisters, softening the dirt, while he watched. “This hurts,” I said, and he said, “Imagine doing that to a whole farm.” Sunday he brought fertilizer and a watering can, and on Wednesday the soil was soft enough to plant.
My azalea bloomed in less than a week, explosions of pink against the rich leaves, and then deer came and systematically ate every single bloom and bud, leaving just stems. I cried when I woke up and saw what had happened, and my grandfather glared in the direction of our creek and muttered something about garden pests. “It wasn’t your fault,” he assured me.
That summer he tried again, this time with a zucchini – the one plant guaranteed to reproduce beyond any gardener’s desire, filling plots with huge green fruits. Once again I tilled the dirt until my palms ached, fertilized patiently, and then planted seeds. Within weeks the plants had sprouted and grown to what I considered epic proportions, and I called him proudly every day to report progress. Soon flowers grew, big soft orange petals, and when they died and fell always tiny zucchini were left behind. I waited anxiously for them to grow, too, and ran outside every morning to watch them get bigger. I poured little bits of sugar water around the plants, convinced it would help them grow – and then the deer got the zucchini, too. Each time a new flower bloomed and a zucchini formed, it was eaten a few days later.
One day I caught a glimpse of my grandparents’ huge white station wagon backing out of our driveway, and I jumped up. “Is Grandpa here?” I asked my parents. They exchanged quick glances and said, “Oh, he was just giving Dad some tools.”
That night I got a phone call. “Your plants looked pretty good!” Grandpa said. “You’re sure doing a good job with them.”
“But there aren’t any zucchini,” I complained.
“Sure there are!” my grandpa protested. “I saw two! You just aren’t looking hard enough. Go look right now.”
I went outside skeptically, but sure enough, when I pushed aside a leaf there were two gorgeous, gigantic zucchini, and I screamed. I picked them up and ran inside to show my parents.
It took me a long time to realize that they hadn’t been attached to the vine and that there was no way my young plant had had enough time to grow such large fruits. My mother baked them for dinner the next night, and everyone raved about what an amazing job I’d done with my garden.
I wish my grandfather could still follow a conversation, because I want to tell him what that was like – discovering what I thought were fruits to my labor; discovering, later, how much he loved me, how much he was rooting for me, wanted to see me happy, wanted me to be proud of myself.
*****
At one of my brother’s baseball game three years ago, my grandparents sat behind me, in the shade, while we cheered for Brett. As we were leaving, my grandfather pointed to a man on the other side of the bleachers, stood up and said something to my grandmother. I only heard her end of the conversation:
“No, it isn’t,” she said, and then louder, “It isn’t.” He said something else, and she turned away, her eyes closed. “Honey,” she said, “That isn’t Vern. Vern’s dead.”
*****
My grandparents enjoyed surprising one another on their birthdays. For Grandma’s seventieth, Grandpa flew in her best friend, Helen, from Washington as a surprise, and called fifty other people. He took Grandma out to dinner for her birthday – which is on Valentine’s Day – and when they got home at eight, we were all waiting inside. The look on her face when we screamed “Surprise!” was priceless, and she cried when she saw Helen.
For my grandmother’s birthday three years ago, when she was seventy-seven, Grandpa gave her two cards, because he forgot about the first one. “Happy sixtieth to the love of my life,” said the second.
*****
My freshman year in high school when I came down with the stomach flu, he was the one I called to take me home, and at that point he was still mostly okay, just a little forgetful. But it was soon after that that things started to change. He took ginkgo pills, but those didn’t do much. He got quieter during the family dinners, and he became more irritable, in tiny ways. For a while it just looked memory loss, standard old age, because it was small things – he’d forget which streets to take during his morning walk, he’d put the juice in the cupboard, he’d forget to be places.
When he was sixteen, he won a driving safety contest, and as his prize he got to take his parents on a trip to New York city. He’s proud of that. On the way there his mother got to stop and visit her sister; it was the last time she saw her alive, and he was the one who enabled that visit, and that means a lot to him. He told me the story when I was ten or eleven, and then, when I got my license when I was seventeen, he asked, “Did I ever tell you about that time I won that driving contest in New York?”
“Let’s hear it,” I said, and he recounted it happily, ending with, “I think I already told you that one.”
But then six or seven months later, when I drove to their house and he was surprised, because he didn’t remember me being old enough to drive, he asked, “Did I ever tell you about the time I won a driving contest in New York?” and I turned away before he could see me cry.
He asked again that night, and once more the next time I saw him.
It’s funny, because now I’d kill to hear him say that again. Now he sits at family dinners, his hands shaking violently – he has Parkinson’s, as well as Alzheimers – doggedly trying to scoop things up with his fork before the shaking knocks them off again. He puts things in his mouth and keeps chewing, forgetting that he’s doing it, so he’s chewing dinner still, not even through his salad, long after the rest of us have finished. My grandmother wipes his mouth for him.
And he doesn’t talk, really, anymore. He’ll answer questions if you ask them, but he has to think about the answers. It’s hardest for me when I walk in and people ask, “Do you know who that is?” and he stares at me, no doubt trying to reconcile the little girl from his memories and the young woman I am now, before he says, “Kelly,” and everyone agrees enthusiastically – as though it’s a triumph. We do that, all of us – we keep track of his “progress.” This summer I went to visit him when my grandma was gone and Maureen was staying with him. “Come play Scrabble with us!” Maureen said on the phone. And so I went, skeptical but hopeful. And when I got there, he was playing – not quickly, and the rules were too difficult for him, where you can put tiles and where you can’t, but when he saw an R, a U a T and an N on his rack he slowly, shakingly lifted them up to spell out “TURN,” and we clapped. It filled me with hope, made me think that maybe his mind was still working better than any of us thought, maybe he could still understand us – but that’s ridiculous, and I know it. There’s no point being excited when he can still do little things like spell, because he’s not going to get better. He is simply going to get worse and worse, less and less the man he used to be, less and less a man at all, and then he will die.
*****
Last year I called home on Valentine’s Day to wish my grandmother a happy birthday. The whole clan was at my aunt Maureen’s house, and they passed the phone around so I could say hi to everyone. My grandfather got it last. “Hi!” I said, my voice too bright, too cheery, and I hate myself for doing that every time I talk to him, pretending that everything’s better than fine.
“Hello,” he says.
I say, “How are you?”
“Good.”
There’s a pause. Then I hear, muffled, him asking someone in the background, “What do I say now?” and my aunt Annette’s voice, “Tell her what you got for Grandma.”
“Flowers,” he says into the phone.
“That’s perfect,” I tell him. “She loves flowers.” I wipe my eyes. “So is everyone there, Grandpa? Everyone but me?”
Another pause, and then I hear him ask, “Is everyone here?”
“Everyone but Chris,” Annette says, and my grandfather says, “Yes.”
“How was dinner? Was it good?” I ask, and he doesn’t say anything. This must be exhausting for him.
I listen to him breathing for a while. “I love you,” I say, finally, but I can’t tell if he’s still listening.
When I hang up I’m crying openly, and my roommate asks what’s wrong. I smile through my tears and wipe my eyes roughly. “Just talking to my grandpa,” I say. “He has Alzheimers, and it’s really hard.”
“You must have loved him so much,” she says, sympathetically, and in that moment I am filled with anger. I hate her for the past tense.
****
Each morning Grandpa used to go walking. He’d get up early, five or six, and wander around. Now a sign above the front door, in Grandma’s shaky script, reads “REMEMBER: DON’T WALK ANYWHERE,” the whole thing underlined twice. Sometimes he slipped past it, and then didn’t come home. Grandma summoned search parties. She’s too old for that. And we cruised the streets looking for him, a heavy old man in plaid flannel, wondering whether he knew he was lost.
Now the sign doesn’t matter; he doesn’t walk anywhere except downstairs to the kitchen, where he eats and watches TV, and then back upstairs to go to sleep. My grandmother lives around him, loving him fiercely, her love evident in the mundane: how she cooks for him, bathes him, dresses him, wipes his face after each meal. She is eighty-one. There are days when I believe she is the most beautiful woman in the world, a queen, and I want her to have back her romance with her husband.
But then sometimes I think she does. In sickness and in health, I think, and perhaps this, the last stage, is in its own way romantic; perhaps in her selfless love, in his complete dependency, she is able to give him something she never has before.
Perhaps not. Perhaps it is cruel and terrible, an indignity to him that we see him like this, that he has to struggle to remember our names – and that, I think, is the more likely option. And I hate what this disease has made him become.
But one day, when I was still at school, he drove to my house to put one of his own zucchini in my plant to make me happy. Every summer he took me waterskiing, patiently killing and restarting the boat each time I fell. I don’t remember a single volleyball game of mine or baseball game of my brother’s that he didn’t attend, and for that, it doesn’t matter what he is now.
I want my story, our story, to end happily. It will not; for happiness we must become retrograde; we must live in the past and forget the now. I don’t know how to reconcile myself to that. I keep hoping that in writing, in committing my feelings and my memories to paper, I will heal. I have not.
Perhaps for us, as for him, there will be no healing in this world.
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3:11 PM
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