From June

When my aunt Mary was in her early twenties, she wrote this description of her parents in a journal: “Kiki and Harold: A mass of confused frustration, or a kind of breakfast-out bargain kids who love to get up early! Their house is full of their kids, dogs, and their guests for wok or spaghetti dinners. Their house has so much flea market stuff, but they know that you can always add another addition to their mass of life.”

I’ve never heard a truer description of my grandparents. Kiki, Harold, and Mary were a trifecta of my young life, of my whole childhood. And now all three of them are dead.

I never met a person who disliked Kiki, but she was always my inner litmus test. If anybody didn’t like her, I knew I couldn’t like them.

When thinking of my grandma, I think of her love of African and Native American art. I think of the way she made jewelry and collected thousands of beads. I think of how she was the first woman in her family to go to college—and then went on to be a part of the school board, to become an art teacher, and to start her own business with her husband. I think of her Yiddish profanity, including an expression that literally translates to “Go shit in the ocean,” and an ancient curse of “May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits!” I think of how she built an enormous house out of wood and stone while pregnant. And I think of her as a violin virtuoso, and the day when, at 90 years old, she picked up a violin for the first time in decades and realized to her dismay that she could not play anymore.

Kiki’s dementia was especially difficult for her because she was used to being the family matriarch. She was used to always being in charge, and her whole life was defined by giving care to others. So when she was in the position of needing care, it distressed her. After Harold passed on in September, she started saying she wanted to go home. Even when she was at her house, she’d tug on the doorknob and start crying, begging her children to take her home. This was heartbreaking, and my husband had an astute insight about it. He thinks that even though her senility prevented her from processing Harold’s death, she understood something was missing. And so with her husband gone, it didn’t feel like home anymore.

Even in severe dementia, her will was astounding. In the hospice, she managed to live for over two weeks with no food or liquids. Most people can only live that way a few days.

Today, shortly before she passed away, her five surviving children gathered together at a beach by the hospice. They wrote her name in huge letters in the sand with a big heart and all danced around her name, shouting it into the sky and yelling, “You’re free!” When they returned to her room, she was still. She’d passed right as they were “releasing” her.

My aunts and uncles are going to donate her brain to the medical community in order to contribute to dementia research, and to learn more about the type she had. It makes perfect, harmonious sense that they would perform a spiritual ritual while also contributing to science. And I know that’s exactly what Kiki would want, because it means she can help people even in death.

Harold, Kiki, and Mary: you are my blood, my trio, my history. And for the rest of my life, you’ll show up in my Technicolor dreams.

From May: My grandma's diaspora

Blank spaces often scare us more than pain. This is why death is so daunting: because our void of knowledge about it is a blank space. The possibilities are infinite, and infinity stretches out past the horizon of our understanding, spinning with so many colors that they all blur into white. This is why many prefer suffering to nothingness; because at least there's still a self to suffer.

When I think of my grandma, who doesn't have much time left, I wonder how much of her memory is buried under snow and how much has been uprooted altogether. Maybe it's like a page where the writing has been erased and she's trying to piece it back together by the ghostly traces. Her page was the first edition, but she's read it to so many people that it's no longer the only copy. The words have scattered from her page onto those of everyone she has loved.

The words aren't lost. Her family still knows her Yiddish and her made-up expressions like "cuckoopots" (meaning anything outrageous). We still know her winking innuendos and her puns; how sitting on a menu is "ass-essing" it. We know her spirited rants against bigotry, anti-Semitism, and bad customer service. We know her stories about how much she loved her students. We know the time the stock market crashed, her elementary school burned down, she caught the measles, and her widowed father remarried all within the same year. How she lay in bed as a sick five-year-old that year, clutching a little toy fire truck, and said to the ceiling, "Mommy, please make me better." How on the day WWII ended, she went to a party in a yellow dress and re-met my grandpa (they'd gone to school together, reconnected at the party, and started dating). How her first boyfriend had been gay, and she grew to care about gay rights before a lot of people did. How she had six children because she wanted one for every millionth Jew killed in the Holocaust.

We remember these things because she told us. Because her life has been a love letter to the world. Or sometimes a complaint letter. Or a bawdy, hilarious manifesto.

One moment a few weeks ago, in a fragment amid a word salad, she said "I want to be everywhere." And she is everywhere, just not in herself.

She has begun her own one-woman diaspora. She has found homes in everyone else.

From April

When somebody you love has Alzheimers or progressing dementia, you miss them while you are with them. You miss the self they had always been.

I've been thinking a lot about my grandma Kiki lately and the qualities that will be missed the most.

Her problem-solving was hilarious and tended to earn her standing ovations in public. There was a time when she was caught in a traffic jam because there was a giant snapping turtle sitting in the middle of the road and nobody knew what to do. So Kiki marched out of her car, grabbed a long stick off the side of the street, and brought it to the turtle. Said snapping turtle immediately latched on and Kiki led it into the woods with the stick. All the other drivers started cheering.

Her sense of humor was so lovable. After my aunt Mary was born, Kiki and my grandpa went back to visit the nurse who had delivered her. They brought her a watermelon wrapped in a baby blanket and said, "We're returning the baby. This one leaks."

She also used to approach other old women in the grocery store, align her shopping cart with theirs, and ask if they wanted to race. And there was the time when she and my grandpa were eating at a diner and he couldn't find the menu, then discovered he had been sitting on it the whole time. Kiki told him, "You were ass-essing the menu."

Even though those are qualities that are rapidly disappearing with the brain disease, and it's crushing to watch them go, they will always be a part of my life because they were a part of her. They're a part of everyone who knew her.