Feeling: sad
Listening to: Zero 7 - In the Waiting Line
Reading/Watching: nothing

My mother's mother is a smart cookie.

She was famous for the disciplinary double-clap, which got the attention of a pair of squabbling six-year-olds better than anything else. If we failed to shut up and get over it, she grabbed the offending parties by the hair and knocked their heads together. Mostly, we paid attention to the double-clap because the sensation of your forehead clunking against someone else's is less than fun.

She loves Elvis, and Crocodile Dundee movies. She hangs pictures of her grandkids (and their kids) all over her home, even if she can't remember their names.

Her mother died when she was young, and she and her brothers and sisters had to take care of each other during the Great Depression. Now she's over eighty, and all her siblings are gone, except her older sister Jo. She was a war bride.

She's had Alzheimer's Disease for several years now, probably longer than most of us realize, because I can remember her mind slipping from the time I was ten years old or so. It's been a while since she's known who I am, even though she always refers to me as "that lovely young lady" when she forgets my name.

I found today that she was moved into a nursing home. She had a house of her own once, a home that her second husband left to her, but she was forced to leave it when her daughters decided she couldn't care for herself anymore, and then she was in a mobile home on my aunt's property.

But apparently she would forget how long she'd been sitting alone in that trailer, and hours would seem like days. She was frustrated, and lonely, and her daughters decided she needed to be in a place with people around her all the time.

It's just sad to realize she's in a home now. She's a writer. She's an artist. She kept her house stocked with junk food year round, even though she didn't eat much, because she loved when her grandkids visited. Now I wonder if she knows enough to miss me. Not whether she misses people in general, but me. One in a few dozen grandchildren, the "lovely young lady" with the curly hair like her son Paul and the soprano voice like her daughter Susie.

I'm unbelievably lucky to be able to say I've never lost someone really close to me. I guess I'm just realizing it will happen, no matter how lucky I am.

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