Grandma had always been the family historian. She held onto all our memories. If somebody couldn’t remember a name, an occasion, an anecdote, she’d have the answer. She even held a web of histories that none of us had experienced firsthand—distant relatives, news from your father’s friend’s daughter’s babysitter, the exact date that great grandpa arrived in the United States from Poland.
Now that her dementia was getting worse, we saw the effects everywhere. Framed accomplishments disappeared from the mantle, leaving dusty outlines behind. Our T-shirt drawers were almost empty, and near our coffee machines we found teabags and ground beans but no mugs. We imagined that resort-branded T-shirts and gift shop mugs used to occupy these spaces. We couldn’t be sure, not without Grandma’s memories of these vacations to guide us.
We first realized the severity of the situation when the whole extended family gathered to celebrate Christmas. We had a vague concept of something missing, but we didn’t know what. Did Cousin Jenny play piano for the family every Christmas? We could conjure a loose image of Cousin Jenny at the piano bench, but her fingers never moved. We strained to remember a song, any song at all. Instead, in this fractured memory, Jenny turns and opens her mouth, but no sound comes out. She might be singing. She might be saying help.
We asked Jenny, and she insisted that she didn’t know how to play piano. Then why is there a piano in your living room? Jenny had no answer. Was your hair always blonde? We thought maybe she had been a brunette. Do you have a boyfriend? A fiancé? If not, then where did that engagement ring come from?
We agreed that somebody needed to visit Grandma daily. We’d take shifts. We’d bring mementos and insist she study them. We brought old VHS recitals and school plays, already beginning to fragment, overlaid with static during half the runtime. We brought photo albums, but they had already become so empty, blank spots where polaroids used to be. We placed our children in front of Grandma and begged her to hold their names in her mind: Lisa. Archer. Chon. Pilar. George.
Grandma smiled and offered each grandchild a candy. And who are you? she asked an empty baby stroller. We couldn’t recall any of us wheeling this stroller into Grandma’s bedroom. We passed terrified looks, desperate to remember anything. We couldn’t even grieve properly, because we didn’t know whose baby had vanished.
We all agreed Grandma wasn’t getting the care she needed in the facility. If she were close by, we could jog her memories daily. We cleaned out the home office and set up a space for her. We filled it with as many reminders as possible. Old clothing, rich with smells. Flowers from her garden. Photos of the entire extended family. Every scrap of history we could find written down—diaries from the older aunts and uncles, printed copies of MySpace and LiveJournal pages from the Gen-Xers, Instagram and TikTok feeds looped on an iPad to help her remember the youngest among us.
Grandma sat down and surveyed the mementoes strewn across the room—it looked more like a storage locker than a bedroom. She smiled and said, It feels so good to be surrounded by love. Meanwhile, we all felt the room was a shrine to desperation and fear, and we watched each object’s dwindling permanence in a cold sweat. Each of us held our hands to our chests and felt our flesh every few minutes, making sure we were still there, wondering if it would hurt when we finally got blinked out of existence.
Grandma dug through the nearest pile of forget-me-nots and found a photograph of Grandpa. It was from the day of his promotion at the factory. You’ll make such a good foreman, she said aloud. I’ll have meatloaf ready when you get home. Grandpa leaned forward and kissed Grandma, and we couldn’t remember who had been standing there earlier. We agreed it was probably Uncle Somebody, and he had been transformed into Grandpa.
The imposter Grandpa left for his job at the factory, just down the street, belching smog into the atmosphere. The entire block was different—though we weren’t sure how. We felt its difference somewhere deep and lost. We huddled around Grandma and asked her what year it was. She shook her head, unable to recall the specifics. Grandma, do you know who I am? Let me tell you all about me, somebody said. No, let me tell you all about me! And please, remember my kids. Remember us all! We each shoved our way forward, hoping to preserve ourselves in Grandma’s memory a moment longer.
You’re all so nice to visit me, Grandma said. She rose from her seat and stood by a pane glass window, gazing off toward the shiny new factory where Grandpa was working hard. We tried pleading again, gentler than before. Grandma said, Don’t worry so much about what I remember. I’m young. There’s still so much ahead of us. We’ve got our whole lives to make new memories. And in that moment, it was all true.
