Realist on Suffering

My Mom and Dad are lying in their bed, and I'm standing at the foot.

Dad says, "Do you feel compelled to do this?" He is referring to me telling my parents that I would move to Ridgecrest, CA to live with Grandma, watch her for her health and safety, and attend community college there. It would be a temporary solution, I acknowledged, since eventually "I will have to return to a four-year university."

I don't know how to respond. The idea of moving to the middle of the Californian desert, leaving my friends, the few I have, and staying with my grandma who needs someone to clean her house, pay her bills, manage her finances, and on top of all that, keep in check her diabetes by balancing snacks and cooking for her (because despite being one of those ol' fashion housewives, she's gone on strike and refused to make any of her own meals) and of course, her dementia. I answer honestly, "I feel compelled to act."

I asked Mom for us to set up a schedule between her and her brother and me that we would visit Grandma once every two weeks, rotating on the duties.

Mom is livid, "I have a job! And Uncle [name retracted] has a job. He works forty hours a week plus an hour and a half drive each way to work. Then, he has to come home on his days off and clean house and cook his meals and take care of his yard and his dog. He is living alone!"

How tragic for him.

She bites down. "Why are you staring at me pissed off? You are sitting there, telling me what to do, and you are judging me!"

It was late last night by the time I returned from Ridgecrest because it's a four hour drive one way. Beck went with me.

Mom and I got into an argument. Mom wanted to call the cops in the morning (this morning) to see if they would pick her up on a 5150. I countered that idea by asking Mom if I could talk Grandma into going to Stanford where there are better doctors and more resources.

"What are they going to do? Keep her for a few days, and then kick her out on the streets of Palo Alto," Mom tells me in anger.

"I was planning on picking her up," I retort. "They can do a lot of things in a few days. They can diagnosis her properly, they can tell you the extent of her deterioration and also there are social workers who can help find her help and a place to stay."

"She won't go."

"Just give me the time to ask her to go in voluntarily and if she won't go, then call the cops."

"She doesn't have electric, and she's eating dairy out of a warm fridge, do you really think that treatment will help? Do you want it to help? Is that really the kind thing?"

"That's horrible to say, and yes, treatment can slow down the deterioration for a while."

The next day I walk into my mother's bedroom to find her slouched in bed, surfing the internet on her computer that's resting in her lap. "Mom," I say. "This is not a problem that you can ignore and it will go away."

But everyone just wants the problem to go away without anyone getting dirty or messy. We have to minimize the situation through denial of one person's extensive suffering.

I knew it was a bad situation when I drove all the way to my grandmother's house, and her truck was not in the driveway--which means either she drove to the grocery store or the truck had been repossessed from lack of payment.

I have Beck at my side, and I knock on the door. No one is coming, and the blinds are drawn so there's no way to see into the house.

I knock again, and wait.

Grandma opens the door and invites me in like she was expecting me.

The idea thing I notice are the dead, dried leaves on the carpet near the door. Grandma hasn't vacuumed in a while.

"Oh, she's getting so big," Grandma says about Beck. She walks into the kitchen, and starts wringing out a shirt or a pair of blue pants in the sink as she has washed them there, I can't tell which.

"She's like me, she's just getting wider." I look around and see an Albertson's shopping cart that rests next to the dining table. Obviously, Grandma has been without a car for a while. "The washing machine isn't working?" I ask.

"There's no hot water out there, I have to get it hooked up."

"I just got in last night," Grandma continues. She mentions seeing her son, my uncle, the one who lives in Nevada. I don't know if she means she was there yesterday or during some earlier trip."Take Beck outside in the back," she offers.

As soon as I walk through the patio, I see something on the ground in the backyard. It's a half-eaten sandwich with rib bones scattered around. Beck nabs one of the bones before I have time to tell her to spit it out. I grab Beck so she won't perforate her stomach, and I march her back into the house.

The garbage is everywhere. In the back yard, some of it is in the front yard. Everywhere, and you can tell that the smell is only going to grow. No one has picked up the trash in a very long time.

I tell my grandma that I need to charge up my cellphone, and I head to my SUV to grab the charger. I plug it into the wall in the kitchen. No response from the phone. Then, I start to look around, and I notice there are no lights on in the house. I see the open carton of cottage cheese with the fork still left in it. I see an empty package for a microwavable dinner that proudly proclaims "6 grams of protein." There are other food articles clotting up the counter.

I open the door of the fridge, and notice how it's just above room temperature.

"Grandma, do you have electricity?" I ask innocently.

"No, I had it turned off because I have been in and out so much over the past couple of months." Later, she would tell me that she called the power company, and that they promised to turn on her lights "tomorrow or the next day." Which is odd because she doesn't own a working phone. She didn't pay the bill on her landline, and according to her, she lost her cellphone. Who did she call and from where?

I sit down on the couch across from her. Beck lays down at my feet on the carpet, obviously exhausted from being so excited in the car. Grandma looks smaller, shriveled even like how a sweater will shrink from all those wash cycles--like Grandma has been through one too many life battles where you just go 'round and 'round, spinning in some machine. "Have you lost weight?" I point out.

"I'm not trying," she responds. Her shoe laces aren't tied--and those happen to be my sneakers. She tells me that her son, my uncle, has been in and out of here, checking in on her--which I know not to be true. Neither of my uncles have been to Ridgecrest in months. Hence why I came--because no one else wanted to. No one wants to deal with an old, sick woman who reminds them of how they might end up someday in the not-so-distant future.

In a shocking display of irony, my grandmother confides in me that she feels like she can be honest with me, and not with the other family members. She wants to move away from this place because it bothers her eyes and her nose.

"Well, if you decide to move, will you tell me?" I ask. The question is ridiculous. She doesn't own a vehicle, and just where is she going to live?

As I'm getting ready to leave, she stops me on the sidewalk to my SUV. She says, "Be careful what you say to your parents about my life. I don't want them to know."

"What don't you want me to tell them?" I'm lying because the entire visit I was TXT-messaging my father about the "grim" picture of the house and Grandma's welfare.

"Everything," she says. "Uncle [name retracted] will come up here and harass me."

My mom decides this morning that she and her brother (my uncle) are going to Ridgecrest on Tuesday, to fix her electricity and to buy her some groceries. "We are not going to bring her back," my mother tells me sternly.

"Your uncle made a valiant effort," my Dad says, talking about how my uncle let Grandma live with him for close to six months--a time which was filled with conflict for the both of them. Grandma ardently and blindly denies having any memory loss or any dementia, despite the fact that her GP told her to her face that she probably had Alzheimer's. She also has refused treatment.

"I am more of a realist," my mother says, insinuating that I have my head in the clouds when I suggest that we try to get Grandma into treatment on a voluntary basis.