Ten Years of Missing You

Ten years ago today, I lost my grandma.

I wrote this sentence and stared at it for a minute. Ten years! This won't be an easy tale to tell, but I have this need inside me to talk about her from time to time—as if it's my way of keeping her alive in my memories.

You see, my grandma was far from perfect. She was a very religious, strict woman, not too warm, and impossibly hard to please. But I loved her more than anyone in my life, and she loved me—well, more than all her other grandchildren, for sure.

I've been thinking a lot about her these past few weeks, triggered by watching the movie Amour by Michael Haneke. For those who haven't seen it, it's about an elderly couple, accomplished musicians, living in a beautiful apartment in Paris, going about their peaceful lives until one morning Anne has a stroke and their life as they know it is over. It's a moving, heartbreaking story—definitely not an easy movie to watch.

For me, it was ten times harder as it took me back to those painful days during the last couple years of my grandma's life.

Everything with her started similarly to what happens in the movie. It took us months to fight our denial and accept our new reality—a reality where she didn't know us anymore, where she had become a shadow of herself, a fragile shell of the woman we knew and loved, needing to be cared for like a child.

I cried my eyes out watching the movie. Later, when talking about it with others, I shared my experience of living with someone with Alzheimer's, and how the moments Haneke chose to show the demise of this person and their relationship are genius.

The first time you need to help them go to the washroom,

The first time you need to bathe them,

The first time you need to help them realize they need to wear diapers,

The first time they refuse to eat and just stare at you with hollow eyes—and you don't even recognize this person who looks like someone you love.

These are all defining moments in the cruel process of losing someone right before your eyes, moments that make you feel more helpless than you've ever felt in your entire life.

It's an endless battle between reality and denial. Just when you think you've accepted this new way of life, knowing it's only a matter of time before you lose this person you love, you find yourself fighting that reality with everything you've got, oblivious to the fact that there's nothing you can do. It's being out of control in the truest sense of the word.

Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to lose my grandmother unexpectedly. Before all this happened, one of my biggest fears was getting that dreaded phone call—the news that would turn my world upside down. Perhaps because that's the picture etched in my mind from childhood: my mother receiving such a call about her own grandmother, whom I adored. I was eight years old, watching my mother wailing while searching for a black dress in her closet.

Maybe that's why I stayed close by. I would visit my grandmother any chance I got, was the only grandchild who would go and stay with her even after I got married, and refused to leave her when she got sick. Perhaps on some subconscious level, I wanted to be there until the end—and I was.

But the other side of that coin was watching her slip away, seeing her getting farther and farther away every day, just melting before my eyes while I stood helpless. The night before she died, my mom took my hands and said, "Let her go. I know how much she means to you, but it's time. You've got to let her go—she's tired."

Did I let her go? I don't know. I guess I did.

What I'm trying to say is that a loss is a loss. It doesn't really matter how or when it happens. When you lose someone you love, you're left with this hollow space right at the bottom of your breastbone, feeling like a vacuum. Remember that falling sensation on a seesaw? It's like that, but bitter and dark.

Ten years have passed, and I still can't talk about her without getting a lump in my throat. It took years to push past the images from those final years and remember instead the beautiful, majestic, elegant woman she was before that cruel disease took her away.

Ten years have passed, and I've come a long way from the mess I was, and I know this experience has made me a different person. The turning point in my grief came when I remembered how much she loved me and how devastated she would have been to see me so broken. She used to tell me stories about the hardships in her life and say, "It's hard, but it'll pass. I can't bear to see you upset. Stand up, go wash your face, and I'll bring you something delicious to eat."

Knowing she would want me to be happy was the only thing that got me through my grief.

Rest in peace, Grandma. I miss you.