En la ruta a la memoria

I'm leaving to spend the day in Southern Colorado with family, we're getting on the road as soon as my husband is out of the shower, and since I don't know if I'll get a decent internet connection again today, I am posting before 6:00am. Gack. It's not even a weekday. We want to get down to Trinidad in time to have lunch with a great uncle of mine, mostly because I want my husband to witness and participate in Saturday lunch at a local restaurant that this uncle haunts and where he hits on the waitresses. He is 92 years old, I believe. Maybe 93. Viejo rabo verde. We will probably hop over the border to NM to visit my grandfather in the afternoon. He is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's and lives in a lockdown unit of a home so he can't go wandering down the highway anymore. He used to do that. He'd set off for Trinidad to visit his siblings who live there (or sometimes the ones who've been dead for ten years), thinking it was a perfectly good idea walk up I-25, over Ratón Pass, no less. As if that weren't bad enough, on the way he'd forget about his sister Margaret and end up thinking he was behind enemy lines in France in the early 40's. When he'd inevitably get picked up by the State Patrol, he couldn't remember his name but he'd insist that he had to get back to his unit, that they were just over that next rise and that they were waiting for him. After a while he began failing to differentiate between English and Spanish and would code-switch at random, not realizing it, and then he lost coherent language altogether. Last time I saw him he liked to mumble, giggle, and make animal noises as though he were telling me a story, but then his eyes would wander off in another direction and he'd forget I was there. When he'd finally look my way again he would smile politely, surprised at the visit from a kind stranger.

I don't know if I visit him for my benefit or his or some combination of the two. I do it for reasons beyond duty, but it's difficult to articulate. My other grandparents did not lose their cognition, they were all three absolutely lucid until the moment they passed. They never stopped knowing who they were, who were were, never slipped out of the stark understanding that disease was rapidly and painfully shortening their time here. It is hard for me to see the silly, gentle, stubborn, contemplative man I knew supressed or disappeared while this muttering shell remains.

My husband is out of the shower and getting dressed. That's my cue to sign out for now. Hasta mañana.