In my life, right now, "A" is for Alzheimer's Disease.
My grandfather was diagnosed just after Christmas. We knew it was coming, or I should say we knew something was on the horizion, we just didn't know it's name until after Christmas. Before you can understand the gradual sifting away, you have to understand the man who is slowly leaving us.
If it were you, who does not know him, instead of me, who does, it may have been funny to see that hearing device on his head, with it's large stereo-phones that went the way of the 8Track twenty years ago, and that not-quite-behind-the-ear-small-nor-so-subtle reciever sitting in his lap. To you he'd probably look like a little old man in really big headphones. To me, it was as if I had walked in on his nakedness.
The General is a proud man, you see.
If he were on a television sitcom, he'd be the old man behind the wheel, his reckless driving due to failing eyesight and dexterity; the laugh track would roll when the local deputy mistakenly pulled him over for DUI. But this is real life and there was nothing funny about the officer at the door, or the decree to suspend his mobility.
If you had grown up with his "woman driving" jokes (more like personal philospophy) as I have, then you may understand that having Grandma in his place behind the wheel now is no laughing matter.
Listening to a conversation with him now may make you chuckle; a person hard of hearing makes for a funny skit. But if he had bounced you on his knee and loved you all your life, you would feel the sand running out of the glass as you try to ask the things you want to know only to have him misunderstand, or to forget the subject entirely.
A passerby may see a yard that needs tending and some weeds to be pulled. As one who was grown on that land as much as the cucumber and tomatoes, looking onto that worm drilled crop and the garden gone dry, I see the body of a loved one passed away.
The repetition and forgetfulness may seem like a small annoyance to those who weren't there when, though he was already in his 70's, he enrolled in college classes- "just to keep the mind sharp"
Oh, and to help him build that beloved airplane in the basement, of which he says now
" I don't think I'm gonna get to finish after all"
An airplane? "Cool" you say- "wow, he liked planes, eh?" and you'd be right, sort of. Because he didn't just like them, he knew them and he flew them and he inspired an entire family to not only aim for those clouds, but to cut a trail right through them.
He was there when I flew around Lady Liberty and told me it wasn't a steering wheel, it was a yoke. I didn't realize I was amongst greatness then, even when air traffic control came over the line and lauded his landing the most beautiful, perfect one he'd ever seen.
If you'd watched as that grown man cried, describing the blessing his marriage had been, or seen him cover the newest family baby a dozen and a half times with the blanket, as we wound our way around that cold, granite mountain...
If he took you out for coffee and put his pride on the line, like only someone who loves you will do, if it were YOU whose life he wasn't afraid to embrace and discuss candidly...
Have you ever had anyone like that? Tell me- do you know what its like to be set on the straight and narrow, or at least pointed in it's direction, without feeling the slightest loss of affection?
If you'd been protected by him over the years, you may understand the fear of his disappearance. If your children had ever rubbed those three smooth nobs where his fingers once were, asking "Grandpa, tell me the story again?" you may understand needing to hear it and a dozen more others, at least again once more, before that day comes where you cannot ask and he cannot tell and you are left only with the past and what you are able to remember of it.
And maybe you would understand the fear of forgetting too, if Alheimer's kissed your grandpa and bid him run away from you.
(rhyming unintentional)