"The Most Elegant Configuration a Hand Could Have..."

This week was my Grandma Kitty's 83rd birthday, so my mom and I took her to lunch at Red Robin. My grandma is in the fairly late stages of dementia and lives in an Alzheimer's care unit at a nursing home here in Reno.

Confession: I am not very close to her, my mom's mom. Her memory loss makes it hard to hold a conversation. I don't see her as often as I should; I have never actually been to visit her at The Courts, the home where she lives. This is because I don't really know what to say to her...I never have. Things were this way even before her mind and her memory started to go. Growing up, we rarely saw her because she and my grandpa Jack, who died in 1999, had retired when I was very little to become "snowbirds," meaning they traveled the country in their RV, moving as the seasons cycled, gravitating to warmth. When I was little they would come through Reno once or twice a year, but as we got older my grandfather's lungs declined and he was unable to handle the altitude here, so we saw them less and less.

Even when we did get together, though, something about the relationship with my grandmother always felt stilted, formal, reserved, lacking laughter. Grandpa Jack was a little more fun--my memories of him are his unique laugh, at once a boom and a titter, and occasional practical jokes like the time he had my aunt's husband, who had never eated an artichoke, believing that the purple leaf-tips were deadly poisonous and that he had to eat around them with the greatest of care. But despite his humor he was still reserved, discipline-oriented in the old fashioned way which says children should be seen and not heard. So they saw my sister and I when they could, and heard us--which would be to know who we were--rarely, if at all. My mom talks a lot about this now, about growing up in a home where love was expressed via discipline and rules and distance. She made it her mission to make sure my sister and I grew up very differently.

Of course dementia hasn't strengthened the quality of our relationship. She's difficult to talk to much of the time--she swings from paranoid comments (she's gotten better about this though; when her mind first began to fall apart, she thought everyone was either after her or up to no good. She was convinced that her assisted living home was a front for a whorehouse) to nonsensical comments and then to even more nonsensical comments. Oddly, she never talks about my grandfather, but she does claim to have multiple husbands and giggles girlishly over certain men she encounters, including an unfortunate postal deliver. Even when she seems somewhat here, I just don't feel warmth toward her. There's love but not the warm love I would like to feel, not the warm love I feel I SHOULD feel. But sometimes I catch a glimpse, just a quick peep into the world of her, a woman-life she must have had but couldn't share, a loving heart beneath the reserve...

I caught a glimpse this week. My grandma has been very into babies lately; she often carries around a plastic baby doll and talks about him and to him like he's real. So we are in the restaurant. And she is facinated by my baby (whom she thinks is my mom's baby). And she can't stop looking at Scarlett, even when we try to talk to her about other things, she is utterly distracted. And then the moment: she is cooing to Scarlett and then about Scarlett and then, I think, about this baby boy that lives in her mind and then she is describing, from nowhere, the feel of a baby's hand on her cheek, she tells me he reaches up and touches you, so tenderly, his hand in the most elegant configuration a hand can have, and it is...

And then she derails, and it's gone. It's another subject--the little girl across the restaurant who has "sticks in her head" (she was wearing ponytails). It's gone but these words stay with me, stop my mind for a minute, and that warmth I'm wanting, there it is. It bubbles up because something about her eyes and her tone remind me in that instant that she is a mother and was once a young mother and she felt, once or a million times, that fierce and tender love in the softness of the tiny hands of her babies. She loved. Even if that love lost its voice as she grew older and they grew older and convictions and conventions told her you don't talk about that tiny hand, that love. But she felt it. And in that moment, so did I.