“What’s my name? Who am I?” my grandmother screamed. “And who are you?” she asked, looking straight at me. I repeated my name, over and over, hoping one of those times it would stick. Her glasses slipped off her nose and her grey hair was a mess.
This went on for 30 minutes, the time it took me to drive us to the hospital.
Last summer, my nonna’s health took a turn for the worse. During a family function, she began sobbing because she couldn’t find a soda. A little while after, she fell asleep in the middle of a conversation. She kept forgetting where she was. She had trouble remembering who we were. There were these little signs that we brushed off. Normally, nonna was baking fig cookies in the kitchen or watching Italian soap operas in the living room. She was the life of the party. She always knew how to make us all laugh.
As long as I’ve known her, nonna gets up every morning, has a cup of coffee with toast, and goes to the stores on Fresh Pond Road in Ridgewood, Queens. She buys yarn and the ingredients for pasta and sauce. Sometimes, she gets pastries from the bakery for dessert.
But things had changed. A little past midnight, we received a phone call that my grandmother was in the street, barefoot. She was crying that she’d gone crazy. My mother drove the three minutes up my block to find her. She did not find my grandmother that night. Instead she found a body. It looked like her but that body lacked a soul, a person. That was the first time we realized we lost her.
Flash forward a few weeks. I’m bringing nonna breakfast. We did this every Saturday. I came to her apartment with my mother and we’d drink coffee and gossip about the family back in Italy. This particular morning, the sun is shining brighter than usual. I open the window to get some air into the kitchen and the light blinds me. As we talk, I see what my mother did that night. A functioning body without a soul. My nonna looks at me and I know there is nothing there. Or at least not the nonna I know.
There was traffic during that car ride to the hospital, so we played 20 questions.
“Do you remember my name?” I asked.
“No,” she responded.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
Silence.
It was like driving a toddler to her first day of preschool. You ask simple questions to see how they respond. What’s 2+2? Do you know how many apples I’ll have left if I had four and ate two? It went like this the entire car ride. Ten years ago, she would have been playing these games with me. She walked me home from school every day. She would pick me up, buy us pizza, and we’d walk home. We’d talk about the neighbors as we passed their houses. One neighbor had a fish tank outside of his house, and every day, she would pick me up so that I could see inside the tank until I was satisfied. We talked about what I did at school that day. We did this every day for eight years.
After the ER admitted her, I walked out to the hospital parking lot and my hands were shaking. I needed air. The parking lot was empty. I worried alone.
Nonna stayed at the hospital for almost four months. Doctors were able to offer her some relief, pills to keep her calm. She’s home now. She calls when she thinks her Italian soap opera got cancelled. In reality, she just never changed the channel from New York One. She forgets to change her clothes, so my mother calls her to remind her. We still go to see her every Saturday morning. But our conversations are different. She usually forgets what we’re talking about.
Things got hard for me, but I still had to go to work and school every day. Some days, I wrote in my journal about how hard it was to see her like this. Writing made it easier to breathe. It made me feel less alone. Life had to go on, I thought. Even though, little by little, she was losing hers.
