Mimi

When a loved one is diagnosed with dementia, you go searching for answers. Or at least I did. There’s all these tips online and from ‘helpful’ people about how to ‘deal with’ them. The prevailing one, I’ve found, is much like improv—just ‘yes and’ them and you’ll avoid any potential meltdowns. When I read that, it clicked. I was like, you know what? I can do this. I can ‘yes and’ her. How bad could it be?

Dementia is a horrible disability. Any memory-affecting condition is, if I’m being totally honest. And not only for the person suffering with it, but for their families too. Look at me, sounding like a pamphlet. I’m all, “Grandma Has Dementia? Five Tips for Navigating the Fog.”

Look, you know it sucks, I know it sucks, and grandma definitely knows it sucks. It’s gotta be scary in there, right? Like one minute, you’re sitting, reading a book or playing cards or watching TV or eating a sandwich and the next you’re just gone. You’re sixteen again, going on your first date. You’re a new mother, cradling your newborn in her nursery. You’re at the playground, watching your child swing wildly on the monkey bars. You’re sitting at the head of the table, saying grace, watching through one barely open eye as your grandchildren fidget through the prayer, pudgy hands greedily sneaking rolls from your Christmas feast. Or, at least, that’s how I think it works. I’m not entirely sure. But if it is, I can only imagine how confusing it must be to be swept from the here and now to the there and then and back again a million times a day.

Mimi’s been at Sunset Pastures for three months. I know, I’m a terrible grandson for waiting all this time to see her. I’m nothing but full of excuses—it’s hard to get off work, flights are expensive, plus I’d have to rent a car and dish out for a hotel room unless I want to stay with mom which is its own can of worms—but in actuality I’ve just been scared to see her. Every time I call her, she’s a little less there. It takes a lot of coaxing, and with the nurses listening in, I feel self-conscious talking to her. Gone are our weekly chats. I used to call her every Sunday at noon, catching her just as she returned home from mass, just before I set out for my Sunday Fundays with friends or my girlfriend. It was so nice. She gave me the hot goss about the church biddies and I shared the grandmother-safe version of my young adulthood. She helped me a lot. Have you ever known a love like that? I never really thought about what it would be like losing the ability to easily talk to her, never really thought about what it would be like to call my Mimi and have to remind her every five minutes that it’s me, Nolan, her grandson, her only daughter’s only child. It breaks my heart. Why can’t she remember me?

Doesn’t she remember that summer I spent in her house, just me and her on those long, hot days after Papa passed? We played checkers, put on puppet shows for her mutt, Roxy Hart. Doesn’t she remember Roxy, part Westie, part meerkat, her crusty eyes and bad breath and ever-wagging tail? The way Roxy yipped and sat up on her hind legs, offering her paws in applause at the end of our shows? Doesn’t she remember attending my high school graduation, absurdly carrying along a handheld foghorn to drown out the cheers of the other grandmas? Doesn’t she remember helping me write and rewrite my college entry essay? Doesn’t she remember attending my thesis defense, clapping in that sterile room when my advisor congratulated me on graduate-level work? Doesn’t she remember weeping as I swept across that stage, accepting the first college diploma in the family? Doesn’t she remember talking me through the pros and cons of proposing to Adeline? Doesn’t she remember taking me for my wedding tuxedo fitting? Doesn’t she remember me?

The answer is: only sometimes. And more and more: rarely. And soon: not at all.

It’s been three months since my mother and her brothers made the decision to send her to Sunset Pastures, a memory care facility specializing in elderly Dementia and Alzheimer’s patients, about a half an hour from my mom’s house. Her room, or so I’ve seen in pictures, is nice. It looks like a little studio apartment. Lots of pictures on the walls, mom close by, familiar throw pillows on the crushed velvet couch. A decent set up.

It’s been three months and I’ve run out of excuses. With summer break, I have nothing but time. My course load at RCCC where I teach history and economics is nonexistent this summer. I guess no one wants to learn when the sun is shining and the beach is beckoning. That’s dramatic, but whatever, let me have it. My Mimi can’t remember me.

So I finally visited. Adeline and I caught an early morning flight to Syracuse. My mom wouldn’t hear of renting a car or hotel room—she picked us up in her trusty Subaru and took us to her split-level house. In retrospect, I’m glad we ended up staying with her. I needed the comfort of my childhood bedroom and my mother’s open arms after seeing Mimi. That made me feel like a child initially, but then I got to thinking about how my mom no longer has the luxury of sobbing in her mother’s arms, and it was a thought I couldn’t bear, so I let it go.

She’d left my room as it had been during my college days—Against Me! and Tom Morello posters hung intentionally off-center, string lights lining the ceiling, bookcase overstuffed with fantasy epics, CDs spilling out of the rack, navy, cream, and brown striped bedspread and all. It was always like a time warp entering my bedroom, and this time I wondered if Mimi ever felt that whiplash when her mind took her somewhere else.

I planned to see Mimi the following day, as soon as visiting hours started. Mom told me to prepare for a short visit, to prepare for her not to know me, to prepare for her to grow agitated and maybe even say something hurtful in her confusion, but I had my secret ‘yes and’ weapon, so I waved away her concerns. She was my Mimi, I was her chouchou, I reasoned, surely she’d see me through the fog.

That first day and evening passed in nervous anticipation. Mom, Adeline and I went through the motions of a normal family visit. We chatted at the kitchen table over tea and coffee cake. We took a walk around the neighborhood, waving at those we remembered, we grilled sausage burgers and corn on the back deck, we watched an old Hitchcock movie, Marnie, with a big bowl of popcorn before bed. None of us acknowledged Mimi’s absence. None of us mentioned the emptiness we felt walking past her vacant bedroom, the downstairs one she moved into during my senior year of college when her memory was beginning to fail her. None of us spoke of the hollowness we felt without her running commentary, hilarious even when she was all there, about the movie—“who is she?” “Why are there marble columns in the horse barn?” “Where are they going?” “What a ridiculous hairdo.” —because if we didn’t speak it plainly, we could still pretend that she was okay, just taking one of her European excursions with her church group.

I barely slept that night. I listened to Adeline’s deep breathing next to me, willing her peaceful slumber to put me at ease, but I was nervous. In truth, I was ill-prepared for the next day. In those quiet hours between midnight and dawn, I argued with myself over the ‘yes and’ approach, but in the light of day, I knew I didn’t have anything else. So I yes and-ed myself.

We had a nice morning, drinking coffee, eating a tomato and ricotta tart, working on the previous Sunday’s NYT crossword together. I told Adeline I wanted to do the first visit alone, and she understood. She hung back with Mom, suggesting a walk to the garden center with the wagon to pick out some new hydrangeas for the area beside the front door. I loved her more for that, taking my mom to see flowers, knowing it would put her at ease while I was with Mimi. Just before I climbed into the car, Mom asked me if I was sure I wanted to go it alone, like I was journeying into one of the circles of hell instead of visiting my Mimi. Maybe she was right to want to go with me. Regardless, I said no. I just really felt like I needed my time with her, just us.

I pulled into the parking lot twenty-nine minutes later. They’d done the place up nice. It didn’t look like a hospital or a stuffy old-folks home, though it certainly was. It looked more like a gargantuan Victorian house with a lush garden and small cottages dotted here and there. It was inviting, warm. I said a silent prayer of gratitude as I summoned the courage to get out of the car. At the reception desk, a friendly nurse about my age greeted me. She said they’d been waiting for me, that Mimi talks about me and my cousins all the time, and that made my heart hurt a little bit, but at the same time, it made me feel good.

The nurse—I’ve forgotten her name, which is unlike me, but I was just so stressed—took me for a walk around the grounds before taking me to Mimi. She wanted to prepare me the same way Mom wanted to prepare me, but here’s the thing: I don’t think you can ever really be prepared for what came next. I barely took in my surroundings, feeling more and more overwhelmed as we approached Mimi’s door. The nurse rested her hand on the handle, set the other on my shoulder, and let me know that they had to remove some photos from the wall, so there would be some glaringly empty spots. She told me that the photos, mostly of Papa, upset Mimi. Like she was reliving his death every time she saw them. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

The walls were more barren than I anticipated. Not only were the photos of Papa missing, but so too were the ones of Great Uncle Henri, Mimi’s late big brother, and his wife Antonia. I made a mental note to rearrange the photos so the empty spaces weren’t so obvious when I returned with Mom and Adeline the following day. There’s no reason Mimi should live with empty spaces in her room and empty spaces in her head. I could do something about one of them at least.

Mimi’s eyes lit up when she saw me, and for a brief moment, my heart soared. She saw me, she knew me. Only she didn’t.

She was sitting at her beloved vanity, a 19th century solid oak piece with a tri-fold mirror, that was her pride and joy. None of us kids were ever allowed to sit in Mimi’s special spot, though I’ve caught some of my cousins sneaking into her bedroom on occasion to sit on her perch, brushing their hair with her antique bristle brush, spritzing her perfume—Guerlain Shalimar—admiring their likeness to our beautiful Mimi.

She was brushing her hair, still full and long in her old age, when I walked in, “Ansel! Oh my, my, you’re early!”

Ansel, my Papa’s name. All my life, especially as I grew out of my gawky teen years and into my moderately less gawky adult years, Mimi told me I looked so much like Papa. I’d seen pictures, of course. I have his unruly, dark curls. I have his big brown eyes. I have his complexion, his nose. I wondered if she ever thought mom or Uncle Julien or Uncle Gabriel were someone else, and if they ever went along with it.

“Sorry, dolly,” I said, summoning my best impression of Papa, whose voice still rings in my ears all these years later, “I just couldn’t wait any longer to see you.”

She rushed toward me, sheepishly, a radiant smile lighting up her face. And in that moment, I saw a flash of the young woman that Papa fell so deeply for.

Mimi stood before me, uncertain of what she should do next. After what felt like an eternity, she said, “Ansel, my Ansel, how I’ve loved and missed you.”

I reached out for her hands, slender and paper-thin, but still as strong as they were when I was a little boy, unsteady on my feet, “I’ve missed you too,” I said truthfully.

She slid her hands up to my shoulders and began swaying to the music softly playing on her old record player. It was a song I recognized, Perry Como’s “Till the End of Time,” Mimi and Papa’s wedding song. We danced easily, shifting back and forth melodically as Perry sang:

Till the end of time

long as stars are in the blue

long as there’s a spring, a bird to sing

I’ll go on loving you

It felt good, there in that room with Mimi. Like we were the only people in the world. I remembered watching her and Papa dance to this very song in the kitchen while she made her world-famous lasagna, in the living room after dessert on holidays, out in the backyard under the stars while we sat around the fire pit, the way he’d hold her, chin resting on her head, spinning and dipping even though the song was too slow for all of that. I remembered the way she insisted on teaching me how to dance to this very song, the way I pantomimed Papa’s movements, realizing he spun and dipped her because it made her laugh and her laugh was full and joyful and resounding.

It broke my heart, there in that room with Mimi. Like we were the only people in the world. I wanted her to remember me. I wanted her to know she was dancing with me, not with Papa, but I refused to shatter the illusion. She was so happy in that moment, how could I? All I could to was pretend, a poor replacement for the love of her life, hold her close and hope that the fog would clear and she’d see me.

The last verse faded out, Perry imploring

So take my heart in sweet surrender

and tenderly say that I’m

the one you love and live for

till the end of time

And I felt a shift in Mimi. She stiffened and I told myself that she might be confused or angry or scared, that she might even think I’m a total stranger. I guarded my heart against it.

She released me and stepped back, looking at me curiously. I felt my heart breaking, could almost hear it shattering. She didn’t know me, but she didn’t seem upset, more inquisitive. She stared and stared and I steeled myself, plastered on the smile she used to love so much she couldn’t help pinching my cheeks and bopping my nose with the tip of her finger.

And then: momentary recognition.

“Nolan?” my Mimi said, again coming toward me, gathering me in her arms, though this time not like her lover but like the child I once was.

“Nolan, mon chouchou,” she said, that radiant smile returning.

We sat on the couch, she cupped my face in her hands and I tried my best not to cry. She said, “You haven’t changed a bit.”