My early childhood was full of sleepovers at Marnie and Pa’s house in the Brisbane suburbs. They’d pump me full of ice cream and coco pops, then swim in the pool and take me to the park.
They even put up with me waking up at 5 in the morning. I’d jump into bed with them and read stories while they dozed back to sleep.
I remember spending hours searching for treasure in Marnie’s junk room, which was full of random stuff she’d accumulated in her lifetime. When I got tired of that, I was allowed to hang out in Pa’s study with him as long as I was quiet.
He’d write and read at his leather-topped desk while I pored over his set of beautifully illustrated encylopedias.
Then suddenly my family moved to Emerald, I started school, Dad started a new job, my brother was born and my grandfather died of cancer.
Marnie started doing strange things. She’d chuck out the silverware instead of washing it, forget where she was in her own house, misplace her car in shopping centre car parks.
It was Alzheimer’s. She was only in her late 50s.
Our last good outing with her happened a few years later. I was nine years old, and my parents and I took her to see the stage musical Les Miserables at QPAC.
It was a fantastic production, but what sticks with me about that night is how much Marnie enjoyed it. Actually, ‘enjoyed’ isn’t the right word, I don’t know if there is one for how much she was affected by it. I suppose she was filled with joy. Here she was in a world where everything was strange and confusing, but she knew love and she knew music. She was still humming and smiling as my mum put her to bed.
Not long after that, she made her last trip out to central Queensland to see her parents (my great-grandparents) and spent time with us at home.
She sat smiling with my dad while he played piano and had a brief moment of lucidity with me, in which she told me stories about the dances she went to where she met my grandfather.
Alzheimer’s took 12 years to get the better of my grandmother and yet she was still outlived by her parents.
By pure luck I got five years of ice cream and stories, while my brother and sister only got to see a strange old lady in a nursing home.
Mum and her sisters had years of stress and the pain of losing their mother as a person, only to start the grieving all over again when her body died.
Right now, there’s no prevention or cure for Alzheimer’s. You can slow it down, but that’s about it. I guess all I can say is be kind to elderly people even if they’re annoying, and tell as many stories as you can so nothing is forgotten forever.
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