It had been several months before the virus spread that I had last seen my grandma. She had a growing case of dementia and was in the throes of reliving her childhood. She didn’t recognize me at all; I think she thought I was some cute boy from another neighborhood. She even acted jealous when I was giving my six year old second cousin attention and wheeled her scooter over to me to get in on the eye contact.
Long before her mental decline, I never really had a good relationship with her, even though she went out of her way to buy my siblings, cousins and me gifts. My mom and aunts always complained about how poorly she treated them during their childhood, and so it was confusing to see her so happy and cheerful as my mom rolled her around Walmart.
“You like this one?” She’d ask with glee as I fawned over a transforming spaceship.
“No, Ma! That’s way too expensive! He can’t…” My mom started.
“Oh, bashaw! He likes it, he can have it!” She insisted.
I think she was trying to make up for leading such a mean life. She even donated extra to her church, talked to the likes of countless strangers (even gave them money that she didn’t have) and would tell people stories about her life, mostly stories about how much her daughters mistreated her. It was a surprising sight to witness given my mom and aunt were taking care of her in her more feeble years.
Both of her parents had died when she was young, and I wonder if that had anything to do with the misery my mom went on about. I saw it firsthand when I was really young, when she could still walk. She and my grandfather had led unhealthy lives, him smoking whole packs of cigarettes at the family’s dining room table, her downing every piece of sugar she could get her hands on. Type 2 diabetes plagued them in their old age, and other ailments followed them like crows to corn.
“Oh, would you be quiet and sit still!” I overheard her yelling at no one from the dining room while my sister and I were playing in the adjacent living room. It must’ve been in regards to us, but I think her and my grandfather were too exhausted in their old age to make a more formal approach.
I remember her telling me about the Yankees, and so it was no surprise that in her childish reminisens that she’d go on about Mickey Mantle and their glory days.
“Did you go to Yankee games when you were young, Grandma?” I asked her one day in a car ride for one of her regular hospital visits.
“Oh, yes, but we mainly saw the news in the paper. That Mickey Mantle was something else,” she said before gazing in my direction, “he was an ambidextrous batter, you know?!”
Looking back on it, I think she thought I looked like him, or at least reminded her of him with my protruded forehead, blonde hair and cheeky smile. That, or she just thought he was handsome and that I should try out for baseball. Whatever the reason, it’s probably my favorite memory of her.
She had already been in hospice when the virus hit her, and it didn’t take long before it took her life. I didn’t feel much of anything in the wake of her death. It was as if all of my mom’s and aunt’s memories had become part of me, so I just felt numb to it all. There was also something disingenuous about her kindness. She would usually greet us with smiles and excitement, but as visits went on, her frown became the staying notion and not much was talked about beyond regrets and complaints about past mistakes and unfortunate circumstances.
“Ma, dad never said that, that just…” My mom would start.
“Oh, caw, come on,” my Grandma spat, “you don’t know what you’re talking about,” as she’d roll her eyes.
I wonder if the virus had been painful for her, if she had even known about the ‘new plague’ in her state of unbeing. The darkness that had come over her mind was enough to shroud the memory of even her daughters and son from present sight, so what was one more ailment to her? I like to think that she barely felt infected by the time the care center had called my mom to tell us she had tested positive.
“Mom’s got the virus,” My mom told my dad after getting off the phone.
“Oh, no…” My dad replied, setting aside whatever work he was busy with, “that might just do it…”
“Hm…” was all my mom could muster. Her and my aunt were the only two out of five that took care of her as she needed more and more support. I think by then, she was just tired and depressed from taking care of someone with a fleeting memory that barked complaints and orders about pain and medication.
I started to think if I could have done more; not about her health but as a better grandson. I wondered if I could have visited her more when her mind was still all there, asked her about life growing up, maybe uncover dark secrets that’d explain the looming unhappiness that afflicted our family. Mostly though, I never questioned it. I felt as if she didn’t deserve such effort from me, even as I got old enough to drive and be able to visit her more often. This sort of bothered me, but it never motivated me enough to change my thinking. I thought “since she treated my mom like shit, why would I treat her any differently?”
One night, years after she had died and the virus had been suppressed to a passing conversation, I asked my mom about my Grandma’s final moments.
“So how long had she had it before she died from the virus?”
“Oh, she didn’t die from the virus. It was phenomenological. It even killed her doctor, that’s what got the ball rolling on them locking down their facilities.” She replied, to my astonishment.
“What? I thought you said she caught it right at the beginning and that’s why…”
“Well, she did catch it, but then she tested negative and lived a few weeks after that. I must not have told you, yeah the employees were all shocked.”
I stood there in shock as she explained how her body somehow killed off the virus and she had continued on.
“Wait, then, what happened? Did she just die from old age, her dementia?”
“Hm, maybe. I firmly believe she died from depression.”
“Depression?” I knew my Grandma was sad, but she didn’t come across as someone who was medically depressed enough to die from it.
“Yeah, because no one could visit her at that time. Everyone was still on edge about the virality of it, whether it was airborne and so forth. With no one around, she must have lost something more in the midst of losing her mind. As if nobody cared about her. I knew other old people who died because of that. Your great grandmother on your grandpa’s side died a month after your great grandfather because she missed him so much, oh you knew that…”
I was beside myself. All those years of telling people she had died from the virus, and she had gotten it, but I had no idea she got over it. Then the heavy really hit harder. What if I had visited more? What if I had gone to her with gifts that she would have enjoyed, like how I enjoyed the transforming spaceship she had gotten for me at the reluctance of my mother? What if I had shown her that I did love her, even with all of the vitriol that was cast between her and her children, and subsequently me? Would she have lived longer? Would she not have fallen so privy to her dementia? Whatever the case, something about her beating the virus, a feat not even the healthiest victims could achieve, in the paroxysm of her mind decaying, made me feel proud to be her grandson.
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