If You Don't Understand the Past, How Can You Plan for the Future?

"You're not taking your memory pill, not that it's going to help a lot."

--The GP talking to my grandmother

My mother insists that grandmother had evidence of a mental illness in her late twenties, that she was always, more or less, crazy. (In another note, yesterday, Grandma looked at me and said, "You think I'm crazy.")

The Grandmother I remembered was kind and giving and compassionate, through many long phone calls as often I coudn't discuss with my mother what I could with her. She gave me a bed to sleep on anytime I needed it, and she cooked for me, and took care of me. I told the Advisor that I felt like I owed her.

Apparently, according to an MRI of her brain about a year ago, she has suffered a series of mini-strokes, thereby causing damage (and essentially killing neurons) in certain areas of her brain. The GP says she could see some "white," which I asked if she was referring to plaques, as often seen in Alzheimer's disease. She said she was seeing something else. So, there is physical evidence of Grandma's dementia, along with the memory test she took one visit to the GP.

Grandma, of course, has decided to no longer take many of her medications (I'm not sure she is taking any consistently or at the right times and in the right amounts), and that she will no longer check her blood for hyperglycemia. Why? No one quite knows, although my mother responded in her dry way, "Killing yourself isn't illegal." Why, though? Why not put in some effort to take care of yourself? I understand people being depressed, hopeless and therefore engaging in destructive behaviors because they believe there is no life to save--my grandmother, while difficult, is not one of those people. Her path down into a potentially very dark end makes no sense to me, and if you were to talk to the Advisor, he would agree that, of course, it doesn't make sense because my grandmother is no longer capable of thinking sensibly. But you would assume that the most basic part of our brain, our drive for survival would outwit any illness, at least not until the grip of the very end.

According to the Advisor, Grandma is no longer able to think about the future in any real way (much less direct action that can pay off dividends in the coming years), she can only thinking about right now. This makes some sense because Grandma can no longer "tell time," in other words, yes, she can look up at a clock and give you the hour, the minutes but she is unable to distinguish days as they happened in the past. She confuses my age by about twelve years. Yesterday, she told me that she was only twenty years older than I am (it's closer to forty-two). She also was convinced that my uncle, her son, had visited her in Ridgecrest on Monday (he hasn't been over to Ridgecrest in many months). So, yes, time has little significance to her. It is warped in a damaged brain. If you don't understand the past, how can you plan for the future?