I am on the plane to visit Utah and my grandma for a couple of days. She has dementia and lives with my aunt and it is always a very mixed bag of emotions seeing her. Her house is a disaster of shifted papers and belongings from one corner to another, with rotting food in the fridge. She tells the same dozen stories over and over and she is so paranoid – terrified that my uncle is stealing her money, my aunt is taking over her house, my uncle is messing with her medications, and she’s going to be placed in a nursing home. She doesn’t remember the conversations where everything is explained to her and her nightmares bleed into her reality.

She’s also profoundly lonely and her loneliness feeds her paranoia. My grandfather died 2 years ago; they were married nearly 60 years. My aunt lives with her, but works and socializing with my grandma is exhausting to even the most patient. While members of her community and church come by and visit occasional, the visits have faded off. So I go and see her every few months for a couple of days – she has latched on to me as her favorite granddaughter AND the doctor, so I can usually ease her into things that nobody else can convince her to do.  I visit, I hug her and listen to her stories (over and over and over), I take her on drives in the country to visualize all of her memories, I nod encouragingly and supportively when she is angry at all of the other family members. I wish, always, that I could do more.

My maternal grandmother died 2 years ago (tomorrow is the anniversary of her death) from severe Alzheimer’s – she was unable to communicate, although she recognized all of us until the end,  and I truly missed her long before she died. In similar ways, I miss my alive-right-now grandma. While she can still communicate, she has such limited short term memory and can’t process more complex conversations. So I can’t discuss politics or religion with her any more. I would love to have some of her advice that she provided me as a teenager (which I didn’t appreciate then).

My plane is about to land. The sun over the Great Salt Lake is breathtaking this afternoon.