Nan is not well.  In the past year, she has broken her back twice and her mind has slipped.  In lucid moments, she describes it as a fog.  Doctors call it dementia.

She often does not know where she is, who she is talking to or what she is saying.  Sometimes she does.  These moments are becoming rare.  The confusion is common.  She is not acting like herself.

This woman who had stoic mastery over her feelings will now sit at her kitchen table crying; who had impeccable manners will now fart without noticing; who devoted her life to her family now forgets who they are.  She was a Christian and attended Church every Sunday.  I doubt she can now remember who Jesus is.

I had been warned about all this before I visited her on Wednesday.  My Mom told me that Nan’s condition had much worsened since the last time I saw her.  Yet, it was possible that she’d be fine.  Having one of her good days.

I never make a decision based on the best possible outcome.  I look frankly at the worst case and then ask myself if the action is still worth it.  If she was having one of her bad days, would I still want to see her?  The answer was yes.

But I was scared to do so.

It would be hard to see her sick.

Nan is simply one of the best people I know.  Although she was always strict with herself, she was always kind towards others.  Politically, she was a member of The Conservative Party and spiritually, she was a Christian.

She took both seriously.

You might think that tells you something about her.  You’d be wrong.

She thought people who opposed gay marriage belonged “in the dark ages.”  She never pounded a bible, tried to convert someone or made a show of any of it.  Nan just believed in Jesus and went to church every Sunday.   If you wanted to go with her, you could.  If you didn’t, she never mentioned it.  We rarely discussed the subject.

She believed faith was a private matter.

Nan believed many things to be private matters.

Though she must not have always felt  polite, strong and kind, she always acted the part.  If she had nothing nice to say, chances were, that she’d say something nice anyway.  She was in control of herself.  I always admired that about her.

Knowing that she’s lost  this control, I was scared to visit her.

To see my Nan weak, as the object of charity rather than the giver of it, felt not only terrifying but wrong.  She was a private woman laid bare by disease.  A polite one who could no longer control her words.  A matriarch of her family who can’t remember their names.  Whatever image I had of my Nan felt like it was going to be sullied.

I value my image of her.  I did not want it to crack.

The image is mainly what I have.  I’m not the best grandson, brother, son, nephew or any sort of relation.  I never visit or call anyone enough.  It’s often difficult for me to establish or maintain closeness.  I am, by nature, distant.

I should have visited her more when she was well.  Should have called her more often.  There’s a lot of things I should have done.  She would have liked to see me and I would have liked to see her.  We enjoyed each other’s company.  We so rarely shared it.   But Nan was always in my heart.  She always felt close.

I wonder if that even matters.

When I walked through her front door and saw her, she did not know who I was.  She sat at her dining room table and asked for a hug.  I gave her one. She has learned that the people visiting her love her and although she might not remember who they are, she knows that they get a hug.  I sat across from her.

She talked about how much she liked my blue plaid suit.  She loved my bright, striped socks and was impressed that my shoes were made from real leather.  I was making a good first impression.  I knew the outfit would cheer her up.

And she looked good too.  Better than I expected.

Nan had always taken great care with appearance.  Seeing her as madwoman in a housecoat, frothing at the mouth while spitting obscenities might have been more than I could bear.  I did not have to bear it.  She wore a lovely blue sweater.

We sat and talked for some time. About her new cat, a stray that she has adopted.  She could not remember his name (Riley) but knew that cats make wonderful companions.  She enjoyed petting him but complained he thought he could go anywhere he pleased.  “He cannot,” she assured me.

Riley, of course, had other ideas.

Nan told me that she no longer understood what was happening and did not know who anyone was.  “I’m in a terrible fog,” she said.  “And when I ask people questions, it upsets them so I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut.”

Then she asked who I was.  And who my Mom was.  I told her.  She didn’t understand.  And I could see her keeping her mouth shut.

The conversation we had often veered into weirdness.  She had the wrong memories and the wrong names, the wrong stories about the wrong things.  Speaking with her was like walking through a dream of her life.  Everything was jumbled up, connected to other things and laid sideways.

It felt as if her mind had reached a singularity.  That every memory she had was mixed up with every other one.  The the words that cued them led to the wrong place or the right place, where the wrong thing was now kept.

Her conversation moved with Dali logic, never quite nonsense, never quite sense.  It groped through a dream fog, finding purchase on any thought and gripped memories for balance.  She stumbled but never quite fell.  And sometimes, I imagined sense where there was none.

She talked about what a fat child I was.  She spoke with such casual conviction that I started to believe that I had been a fat child and this had somehow be kept from me.  I was carefully reviewing my memories for clues when my Mom said:

“You’re thinking of Brian.”

“Who?” asked my Nan.  She now calls him Bill.

As you can see from the picture below, we’re easily confused with each other.

The conversation, as it so often does with my Nan, turned to literature.  Though she might not remember me, she remembers Shakespeare. She spoke of how she can no longer read him but can still skim and find parts of his work that are luminously true.

She tried to remember something from Twelfth Night.  “He thinks too much,” she finally quoted.  “Such men are dangerous.”

This line is from Julius Caesar yet she attributed it to Twelfth Night.  I can’t help but wonder if she meant to say something else; something from that play.

“Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time in you?”

Her past has become a part of her present, confusing both.  There are things she wants to write down, little bits of knowledge she fears will be lost.  Nan told me that the cover you put on top of chair is called an “Anti-Castor Oil.”  That they were used to protect furniture from the castor oil men used to put in their hair.

“They also used to wear smoking caps,” I said.

“And what beautiful caps they were,” she said.  “Men wearing those built Canada.”

She looked for the book she has been writing.  It’s nothing fancy and has no literary pretensions.  It’s simply a chronicle of her life.  Her mother wrote a similar book in Ireland.  It has been lost.  Nan started writing hers a few years ago.  Now she can’t find the notebook.  No one can.

While looking, Nan found a copy of Hello Magazine on her table, a gift for a friend who is in a home and loves celebrities.  Nan looked at it, saw Brangelina for the first time and said:  “Oh, it’s that magazine about stuck-up people.”

Her dementia is more eloquently accurate than most people’s sanity.

I had been scared to see her.  I had expected to find an imposter; an insensible creature occupying and defiling my Nan’s body.   When people say, I do not want to remember them like that, I understand.  I felt that way too.

But I no longer feel that way.

Seeing someone I love who has become sick, someone I admired for their strength, I felt different than I expected.  I thought it would be awful.  It was not.

My memories of Nan remain intact.  The illness is strong but too weak to lessen or corrupt the years I’ve spent with her.  She is sick.  But that’s all it is.

Being ill can seem like an act of betrayal.

It is not.

If you see a suffering friend, do you find it hard to look at them?  Of course not.  You try to help.  If you’re unable to help, you try to be there for them.   You do what you can and it doesn’t feel bad to do it.   But if you thought about it before, you might think it will. There is no problem that imagination can’t make worse.

I thought it would hurt me to see Nan.

I was wrong.

When I saw her, I just wanted to listen and speak with her.  It’s of no import if she forgets me.  I remember her. She doesn’t recognize me but I can recognize her.  Just in the little things: The expression of her face in certain moments, the occasional bend of her thinking, phrasing of her speech and the sound of her voice.  I recognize her.  And, sometimes, I don’t.

Was the conversation often awkward?  Of course it was.  Did she occasionally make me feel uncomfortable with her words or actions?  Yes.  Did she say things that were hurtful?  No.  You need intent to be genuinely hurtful.  My Nan has no such intent.  She’s just sick.  She’s not doing anything to anyone.

It’s just something that is happening.

I’m happy that I saw my Nan.  I only hope to see her again.