The woman who lived in the house next to ours for my entire childhood was like a grandmother to me. She was a registered nurse who retired when I was about five years old. She was the youngest daughter of Irish immigrants and lived almost her entire life in that house. I would visit her almost every day. Sometimes we would have lunch together, or I would help her make cookies, or just do household errands for her. My job was to take out the trash each day. In return I was treated to her delicious homemade pies, cakes, and cookies. Not a bad deal.
As the years went by, I was old enough to drive and her vision was failing due to cataracts, I became her chauffeur. We would run to the farmers' market or we would load gallon jugs into the trunk of her 1971 Chevy Malibu and go to a spring than ran out the side of a mountain through a metal pipe. We filled the jugs with water and put them back in the trunk. When we returned home I would carry them to the house and place them under the cellar steps.
Each visit I was also treated to stories. Some of the stories I had heard dozens of times, but once in a while she would tell me about something I had never heard before. About being in New York for nursing school during The Depression. About registering to vote as a Republican by mistake and never telling her father and never switching parties because she didn't want to be a "turncoat" like Ronald Reagan.
By the time I started college she was in her late 70s and starting to have mini-strokes. My visits became less frequent because I was two hours away, but my parents still lived next door and they checked in on her often. Then she broke her hip. That was the beginning of the end. Up until that point she was very active. She attended mass every day, she cooked dinner for her friend nearly every day, and she often went out to eat. After the broken hip she needed a home health aid and soon she needed full-time nursing care and ended up entering a nursing home.
Each time a visited she was a little more out of it. At first she knew who I was and would talk about sports and current events. But gradually she started to forget my name. She still knew who I was but could not remember my name. Then maybe a few months later she would call me by her brother's name. Her brother died in WWII. Then she would ask me to do something because she wanted the place to look nice when Mary (her sister who died 30 years before) came to visit later that day.
Eventually when I went to visit we would just sit there silently. She was almost completely deaf for most of her adult life but she could read lips. In her mid-80s her cataracts were back and she could not see to read lips, so she was trapped in a silent fuzzy world full of strangers.
As Mr Warga points out in his NPR piece, his grandmother has been slowly fading away and is now all but gone. That is how I felt with each visit. Her body was still there, the person that I had known for the past 25 years was already gone.
A few months after my last visit she passed away in the nursing home. I returned for the funeral. My brother and I were pallbearers. It was sad to see that very few people attended the funeral. She had out-lived most of her friends, and all of her family. She never married and had no children. There were just a few neighbors and the old ladies who attend all of the funeral masses.
After the mass we travelled to the cemetary. To the gravesite that she showed me dozens of times as we tended the graves of her parents, grandparents, and siblings. "There's Mom and Pop, I'll be down here on the end next to Mary," she'd say.
