When the Lights Began to Flicker

A Story by Lauren

Near the end, things always get worse, no exceptions. Lovers quarrel, friends give the cold shoulder. If you put a tangerine and a manderin orange beside each other, you might think they're the exact same thing. But below the superficiality of appearance, tangerines and mandarins are completely dissimilar kinds of oranges.

That's how it was near the end of my grandmother's life. Mema still looked the same as she always had - soft gray curls, rosy cheeks, beautiful smile - but underneath the surface she had become an entirely different person.

Mema - Betty LaRue Carden, my paternal grandmother - was one of the strongest women I'll ever know; her skin was thick, but it was the softest in the world to touch. She had no shame about her, and I suppose that is what I greatest admired in her. She had the deepest, most beautiful blue eyes, and every single one of her countless sports and wrinkles told a story. She loved her family, adored her God, and constantly put everyone else ahead of herself.

I was the baby of the family when she first started showing signs of Alzheimer's disease.

As the sickness progressively worsened, the adults in our family discussed my grandmother's fate in a hushed tone suitable for small talk in a funeral parlor, as though Mema was the subject of some kind of taboo gossip. Would we make a room for her in one of her children's homes? Would she end up in one of those God-awful nursing homes? I did my best to ignore the cacophony of thoughts echoing in my head - even when their voices ceased - but my willfulness failed me:

"I don't have any space left in my house!"

"I'm not willing to drive that far, I'm sorry."

"I'm always so busy, you know?"

"I'll visit her on the first and third weekends of the month and you can have the second and fourth."

On our mindless daily walks up and down the corridors of her building the summer before they brought her home to live with us, I held her hand tightly in mine. During that season I took notice of the dead flies on the windowsill at the end of her sixth floor hallway.

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Mema's apartment at JFK Towers was a plethora of smells - sweet smells which even now haunt my nostrils with my late grandmother's memory: warm brownies baking in the grease-stained oven, baby powder she unwittingly sprinkled on the bathroom floor after her showers, fried chicken every Sunday afternoon after church. And I think of sounds, like the classic country resonating from the alarm clock radio she never bothered to turn off when she woke up in the morning and the soap operas constantly playing out on her old Zenith set. Those things are still around me, but never again will I live the circumstances that initially brought me to love them.

I remember staying with Mema quite often when I was young, back before I knew she was sick. There was a cupboard in her tiny closet of a kitchen filled with food - and not just any food - junk food. I'm talking Little Debbie heaven! There were Oatmeal Creme Pies, Star Crunch, Fudge Rounds, you name it; but oh, how I loved Swiss Cake Rolls the most! One day my mother specifically told her "no sweets," no-so-subtly cocking her head in my direction. There was an agreement, and then a brief farewell as my mother stepped out the door and left for work. Mema's face suddenly lit up in devious anticipation, and she grabbed my hand and led me to The Cabinet. That moment, that sinking of my not-yet-5-year-old baby teeth into my precious Swiss Rolls...it's an instant in time I shall never forget.

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Little Debbie desserts seem trivial to me now as I sit in the cafeteria with Daddy; I have to swallow back my tears as he holds the spoonful of mashed potatoes to her trembling lips. I think I'm going to scream and curse at the top of my lungs, but I don't know what good it'll do. If we leave she'll just stare at the portions on her plate and wait for the food to come.

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I remember there was another time I stayed at JFK with Mema when we walked down to the vending machine on the ground floor from the sixth. She knew my favorite candy was Reese's Cups, and there was a row of them facing us from the window of the machine. We hadn't planned on going to get a snack in the first place - we were just roaming the halls as we so often did - so she had to go back to 610 to get some change. I followed her to her top dresser drawer, the one filled with half-eated rolls of Tums and Big Lots receipts and lint. There she rummaged until she came up with just enough coins to buy one pack of my beloved Reese's. That's all she had. We returned to the machine, my grandmother popped in the forty-five cents, and we split the pair of Cups between us.

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When I was candystriping at the home this afternoon, I felt obligated to visit her room. It smelled heavily of fresh feces. It took at least twenty minutes of my hassling to get an orderly in there to clean her up. I was mortified, but only God and I knew it.

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The best - and I do mean the best - memory I shared with my grandmother was the twentieth of July, 1993. I had such a horrible time getting to sleep on the nineteenth, mindlessly twisting the bedsheets around my ankles and unintentionally kicking Mema's legs in the night. I knew what was coming - the long-awaited arriving of a baby sibling - and my nine-year-old heart temporarily took on the role of a fiercely beating bongo drum. The phone rang just once the morning my sister was born. I nearly fell out of Mema's huge four-post bed as I scrambled to grab it. Daddy was on the other line. As he told me the good news, I vividly remember jumping up and down and all around, squealing with delight and excitement. And I remember Mema standing there in the doorway of her bedroom, laughing and looking at me so proudly. I wish I could see her look at me that way again, just once more.

I was seven when I got wind of her disease. No one came right out and told me she was slowly losing her memory, but it didn't take long for the facts to present themselves. I had to grow up pretty fast to realize that she was just a temporary entity and wouldn't last forever as I always imagined she would. Suddenly every moment by her side, every heartbeat I felt when I pressed my ear to her chest, every smile she wore on that beautiful wrinkled face became fleeting treasures; there were as seashells in an angry tide, tossed at random on the shore for a brief moment before they were washed away again in an instant. The way she got up in the middle of the night just to cover me with a second blanket became an anticipated ritual. I trained my mind to wake up with the touch of her hands on my back; I didn't want to miss that hug. I wasn't sure how many I had left. And oh, they felt so good.

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"I wan't my mommy," she sobs, as in her folded arms she suffocates the teddy bear Daddy bought her at the Eckerd Drug on Guess. "Where's my mommy?" I realize now that I haven't prepared myself to see her mentally wander back to childhood. But is there really a way for one to do that?

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When Mema came to live with us, I became a zombie. I walked around aimlessly and stared off into space much of the time. I never hated her, just despised the demon that ate her right mind and left me with the crumbs. I often had dreams that there was a dimly glowing ghost wandering the hallway at night. When Mom found Mema standing in the living room with pee running down her legs, I realized they weren't dreams at all. Mema kept losing her way to the bathroom, mere feet from the makeshift room we gave her in the living room.

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I need a sabbatical from this life. Whenever Dad asks me if I want to go with him to the rest home, I always want to say no. Is that bad? I'm tired of feeding her bananas and sweet iced tea on the patio, tired of hearing her call Daddy her "husband." Does that make me a bad person?

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Near the end, when I saw Mema for the very last time, she was lying in an uncomfortable bed in a frigid hospital room. The pneumonia she caught was the final straw that tipped the Mema scale from tangerine to mandarin. She had lost control of her jaw, and it had sunk so far down that her chin rested and quivered on her collarbone. She was wheezing uncontrollably, and I collapsed with tears in my father's arms. Daddy told me to be strong for her, so I straightened myself out and walked over to her bedside.

Her eyes were fixed on heaven, I suppose, for she looked out into some unseen plateau of light. Her hands trembled and her once rosy lips were now a cold shade of pale. She was so far gone, and finally I was able to recognize it for what it was. She was so pitiful, so unbelievably uncomfortable that I could scarcely stand to look at her. I somehow garnered the strength to sob the words "I love you" - and then the unimaginable happened; out of her catatonic state of being, out of the person she had been and back into the grandmother I remembered from my early childhood, Mema turned away from heaven for a moment and focused her faint blue eyes right into mine.

"I love you, too," she said.

It was in that ephemeral moment that I truly realized what I meant to her and what she represented to me: a beacon of hope and love, one that I'll never see again on this earth, but one that lingers still in my heart and mind.

Daddy later told me that she had seemingly lost her ability to talk and had spoken to no one else. She died the morning after I visited her, and in my mind I cried eulogies for bananas and sweet iced tea on the patio.