The hands of a beautiful young woman are suspended in time; one draped elegantly beside her body while the other hovers outstretched, beckoning us to join in Cio Cio San’s loss and hope, in Mimi’s death, in Tosca’s murder of Scarpia and ultimately in my grandmother’s passion…her art, her music, her love, and her voice.

     I remember as a little girl, as a teenager, and even as an adult lying beside my grandmother on her bed – quietly watching C-SPAN or TCM and waiting for the moment she would reach out and hold my hand.  It always came.  It was always consistent.  Her hands: I have always loved; pleasantly firm and gentle – soft, still beautiful although aged.  They are the same hands that I admired and envied in photographs of her opera career.

    These hands which have always grasped mine also comforted my mother as a child and once tenderly caressed my grandfather’s face, and patiently cared for my great-grandmother’s hair as she slowly died from pancreatic cancer.  And, there is a strange feeling that overcomes one when you are in a room with a living, breathing memory….when those memories are wrapped up in the square palm and faint lines of a loved one’s touch: 83 years of history entwining itself around my fingertips…touching my own.

There is pain too when she reaches for my hand now: Unable to say my name because she no longer remembers it, unable to remember who the little blonde toddler belongs to…although she is gently reminded repeatedly that it is her great-granddaughter (my daughter).  This beautiful woman, whom I always fancied I was secretly very much like, no longer remembers that which holds so deep a place in the depths of my heart.

All the times we naughtily fawned over Rutger Hauer or Yul Brynner, or spoke at length of our mutual love of Renee Fleming and Frank Sinatra.  All the See’s chocolates we sneakily shared, the times we would go through her jewelry chest and she would tell me stories about where each piece came from: a simple, tiny, gold wedding band from her mother or the pearl choker an admirer sent her in 1961.  How she always loved her Tenors and I loved the Baritones.  Stories of her alcoholic mother and her adoring father.  How hilarious my grandfather had been as a young man.  Her politics; her wit and sharpness.  The times she comforted me when I would cry because I was worried about my mother’s health…while later crying by herself.  The three weeks during Christmas vacation I would spend with her every year watching marathons of Vivian Leigh films.  Her opera career….traveling….all her romances…her great loves…her losses.  Whether she believed in God, how she missed time…how she was so glad she had lived the life she had.  Her children.

This!  All of this is gone…it no longer exists except in my own mind – the shared experiences torn away in such a short time that I’m still grappling with this constant undoing.

My grandmother was a huge part of my life; I always felt I knew her as no one else did.  I took the time to learn about her, to know her, to love her and my bond with her was always OUR’s.  Every time she held my hand I felt her love and our connection.  Now, as she enters into that particular phase of Alzheimer’s I feel her fear…the hesitancy…the grasping for recognition without her ever uttering a word; It hangs heavy.  The release of each moment: significant because each breath of time is now new and raw…and painfully tender in the understanding that as we move through — it is constantly dissolving.

It hurts to be around her.  I’m selfishly drifting in my own confusion: The want to be with her in this final phase simply not bowing to my need to retain my memories of her.  The woman I have adored since I was little is there but ‘She’ is not Her.

I watch as my uncle and mother fight internally – struggle to retain what balance they can between their own continuous loss and their mother’s – knowing that soon….very soon it will be only THEIR’s, and that this history they have shared (for good and bad) will be no longer.

All of the years spent in anger, parental failings, addiction, their own dramas and their youth becoming a growing monster of bereavement; threatening to overtake the last passage of time they have with her.

Yet, her hands are constant and I find it sad that while my grandmother is still able to recognize that she is indeed disappearing – the need to have that physical connection remains, whether she makes the connection to the person next to her, or not.

I lost my father a few years ago to suicide, and I am losing my grandmother to another kind of death – altogether slow, yet so fast in its reign.  I often wonder which is worse?  They both hurt, they both shake my core and have me questioning but I find that the answer is both.

I have so few memories with my father, and SO many with my grandmother but I am unsatisfied with both endings.

Death is the end no matter how it goes.  It will always be hard on the survivors – whether the dying party chose their fate or not.

At the end … what do we, as the survivors, choose????

I know a girl and her name is Carol.

She is my grandmother.