Thomas Makes A New Friend On A Sad Evening

This is Thomas and his new friend Constance. Constance the Reading Owl was picked up at Starbucks last night and lives on Amanda's nightstand, constantly reading. If Amanda was an owl, she would be Constance. Constance is reading Thomas a story.

No time for a blog yesterday--sorry about that. It was last night at about 6 or so when my mom gave us a call to let us know Nana Courtney (my mom's mom) was dying. As of the time of this writing (5pm on Thursday) she is still alive. Apparently, she had a stroke; now, she is essentially on a morphine drip to keep her comfortable while her system slowly shuts down. So, all there is to do is wait and hope. The waiting is for her to die, and the hoping is that she will do it without pain. Nana has been suffering from a progressively deepening case of Alzheimer's Disease for a number of years, and, in many ways, we lost her long ago. What a mysterious thing Alzheimer's is; I guess, for me, whenever I am feeling sad, lost, or hopeless about something, I find solace in the nostalgia of thinking about the past--the good times, the memories, the people who've impacted my life. But Nana has been unable to do this for some time now.

There is a book I remember reading when I was younger called THE GIVER, by Lois Lowry. In it, humans have created a society where memory is "selective," and people have no ownership over their own memories or pasts. One boy has the job of "giving"memories to people. How awful. Imaginging NOT having memory is like imagining forgetting how to speak English, or trying to think about how big the universe is, since every star we see could be a separate solar system. It is unfathomable. And this is something Nana has been dealing with for three years.

Sometimes its difficult to put the words together to formulate just what you want to say, and this is one of those times. I find myself constantly erasing sentences and shaking my head at how jumbled this entry is. I havent seen my grandmother much since we've moved to Maine--we went down to see her when we could, but I conceded long ago that the Nana Courtney I knew and loved was now a vapid reminder of her former self.

But what a sharp wit she had--up through the final time I saw her this past January. What a flavor she had for the sarcastic and flippant comment. I know this is something I inherited from her. My grandmother read more books and did more crossword puzzles in her lifetime than I'll ever come close to doing. She worked, FULL TIME, until she was 85 years old, hardly ever missing a day. She raised six children on her own in the Roxbury and Dorchester projects of Boston in the 1950's. She lost two husbands to heart attacks within about 6 years of each other. She made wonderfully rich French Toast. She always had a full jar of M&Ms and an unopened can of Pringles. She appreciated my cynical sense of humor, and I could see in her eyes, even up to the last time we saw her, that she knew me on a deeper level than I may have previously thought.

Can we ever truly forget everything?