Today was my grandmother's birthday.
My grandmother, golden and fierce,
Loose with the change
And liberal with me, her first grandchild.
She ruled for decades with an iron rod
Never turned away an urchin
Without a kind word, and a cookie.
Later, she gradually took to bed,
Refusing to walk, citing painful knees
Laughing a little less generously
And beginning unceremoniously (uncharacteristically)
her slow arduous journey
Into forgetting.
I sat by her side in the later days
She, a still shadow of her former glory
Me, flitting faintly through her present
Trying to uncover that childhood kaleidoscope.
Did you see me then, I wonder?
On whom you had bestowed
A childbirth prophecy to be a doctor
Whom you had taught–
Charity, humanity, letter writing.
As it turned out, I became trained to diagnose
PSP-FTD only too well.
In your massive reversal–
–your apathy, your language, your tremulous hand.
These were not you, I knew,
These were your disease,
Like clothes, I wished you could discard them,
But they clung, a hard new skin.
In those last days
Every vestige of you was gone
As if your very will was bidding adieu
I could not locate you
In those dark eyes, that slack face, that immobility
That non-grandmother, non-mother person.
I hope that, in passing, you emerged victorious
Against those demons that had chased you
for so long
My memories of you, warm as winter sunlight,
Reassure me that you would have.