First of all, a very happy birthday to Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling! I spent 7:30-midnight last night volunteering at the Barnes and Noble release party for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and it was a blast. But Harry and JK aren’t the only ones who have a birthday today. Today is also the 84th birthday of my grandmother on my mother’s side.

Because of my grandmother’s ever-worsening dementia, every year we seem to appreciate her birthday more, even as every year she understands less and less why we all gather at her house on this day.

A couple years ago during my last year of college, I wrote an essay about my grandmother’s dementia and in honor of her birthday, I’m going to share it:

FADED WITH TIME

It always seemed somewhat ironic to me that there’s an abundance of pictures of moments from recent years my grandmother can’t remember, but almost no photographic evidence of the times she can’t actually forget. I’ve never seen more than a few pictures of her parents, and most of them are so worn and wrinkled from her fingers running across that the figures are hardly recognizable as people. Often, when I go to my grandparents’ house, she’ll take one out and show it to me, saying over and over again, “my mother and dad.” Then she always giggles, almost like crying is just another thing that she’s forgotten.

My grandfather has always watched these moments quietly from across the room. I could never quite tell if his silence was due to sadness or impassiveness. Throughout the recent years, I never took into much consideration what effect my grandma’s condition had on my grandfather. For most of my youth he was such an impassive figure that I never thought of him being someone affected by anything. I started realizing that Grandpa, with his strong build, and wavy hair, still black after eighty-one years, was only tough because my grandma couldn’t be. Whenever we sit at their kitchen table and play a round of Euchre or Three to Thirteen, and Grandma says “what day is it?” when she means “what hand are we on?” and she can’t figure out the difference between clubs and spades, Grandpa chuckles and laughs. He always says something along the lines of, “she has such trouble with cards now. Used to be a champion at them, now she can’t get the rules through her thick skull.” He would say this right in front of her, loud, but she wouldn’t even blink. He’s never trying to be mean or anything; he’s always laughing good-naturedly when he says it. “What did I tell you?” he’d go on. “Off in her own damn world so often now that she doesn’t have any business in this one anymore.” He always hid what he really felt, but I’ll never know if it was for our benefit or his. Probably a little bit of both.

My grandfather has always been the opposite of my grandma. While she’s quiet and timid, laughing in nervous giggles, he makes himself heard with loud guffaws and shouts out things like “Whoopee Shithouse!” when he’s excited. He never just lays a card down, he chucks it toward the center of the table, banging his fist in the process, like he doesn’t want to go through a moment of life without being heard. It fits then, too, that his memory is also the opposite. If I asked him, he could probably tell me how many cracks were in the sidewalk the day he walked to his first day of school. He is an endless supply of “back then”s and “We used to”s, things that are no longer in my grandma’s vocabulary.

My grandmother’s stories left the earth a long time before she will. She used to tell me about how she met my grandpa at the county dance in the 1950. Then she’d launch into their whirlwind romance, him going off to war in Korea as a radio operator and ordering the engagement ring by mail, having it sent to her with a letter asking her to marry him. She probably hasn’t forgotten this story, since it took place so long ago, but she seems to have forgotten how to tell it. The memories are slowly ebbing from her mind starting now and working their back, like her mind’s rewinding. Maybe when it comes time for her to die this means she won’t remember a thing, so it will actually feel like she’s being born.

One thing that hasn’t changed is my grandma’s reaction to death. Her own death she has always accepted, perhaps from being such a devout Catholic. Every time I saw her the year leading up to her 80th birthday she would pat my shoulder and repeat, “Just pray for me when I go to heaven,” then nod matter-of-factly, like she’d just made a comment on the weather outside or something. Whenever my grandpa overheard this he’d shout, “Cripes woman, I’ve been eighty for a year and I’m still kicking!” but she never seemed to hear him. Anyway, it’s other people she can’t let go of as easily. In the 1970’s she gave birth to her eighth and final child, a stillborn girl. She named her Mary Elizabeth after her mother and buried her next to my grandfather’s parents in the cemetery down the road from her, now my, house. Every year on that day she brings out the funeral pictures, with my aunts and uncles all gathered around the tiny coffin, like a collection of rather morbid family photos. At first I hated these pictures, strewn across the counter for weeks until my Grandma finally decided to pack them away again. Recently, though, I realized she did this routine for the same reason she points to me and repeats my name over and over every time she sees me. She’s afraid of forgetting.

My grandparents didn’t seem lose anybody close to them for a long time until this year. This past winter my grandma’s youngest sister and many of my grandfather’s older siblings all died. I wasn’t home to witness their devastation from the constant parade of family funerals, but I have heard what my cousins witnessed. At Alice’s, my grandma’s sister’s, wake, when it was Grandma’s turn at the casket, she refused to leave it. She placed her wrinkled hands on her sister’s folded ones and repeated over and over, “I love you,” until the phrase was made up more of tears than intelligible words. My grandpa had to place his hands on her shoulders and lead her away.

The last time I was over visiting my grandparents, about a month after the funerals, I lay on the living room couch and closed my eyes. Once my grandpa thought I was sleeping, I heard him murmuring to my aunt. “It’s gotten worse,” he said. “I try not to mind, but it’s embarrassing, you know? They have free suckers at the grocery store checkout line and she always takes the cup and dumps the whole thing into her purse. I can’t tell her not to, because she won’t register it.” He went on to say how she kept repeating his brothers’ and her sister’s names over and over again, and talked about visiting them, because she didn’t realize they were dead. In the silence that followed this I could almost see him leaning into his hands, shaking his head, unsure where to go from there. It was the only time I ever heard him address my grandmother’s dementia without joking about it.

My grandfather makes me wonder if it’s as much of a curse to remember everything as it is to remember nothing. Memories probably didn’t seem like much of a burden until he was the only one burdened with them. Sometimes he tries to fill hers in for her, telling her what she did and when she did it, but mostly he’s stopped trying. Now when she says, “tomorrow we went to the casino with Rodney and her father,” he doesn’t even bother to translate it to “yesterday we went to the casino with Kevin and his wife.” She gets so many words mixed up now that at some point, we just can’t listen to her version of anything anymore.

Recently I realized that perhaps it isn’t my grandmother I should be worrying about, or feeling sorry for. She won’t be able to remember her grief from losing one sibling, but Grandpa has to live with losing four in one season. To me, it is a wonder his mind isn’t the one that is broken. When my grandmother lost most of her memories, he lost most of his wife.

When I witness my grandmother trying to grasp at the things that left long ago, at first I still do pity her. And then the fear starts to set in. All of a sudden I try to take in every detail of the moment—her bottom lip jutting out in a slight pout, the Twins game blaring in the background so my nearly-deaf grandpa can hear, the sunlight hitting the china cabinet full of crystal figurines from when my grandparents were well enough to travel, and the smell of baking cinnamon rolls that my aunt put in the oven because my grandma doesn’t remember how to cook anymore. I think, if I can notice it all, burn it into my memory, then maybe I can avoid the same thing happening to me. If I do that, then maybe genetics will never catch up to me. I realize then, that I’m afraid of forgetting too.

Since writing this essay, my grandmother’s dementia has gotten steadily worse to the point where she stopped speaking. Sometimes she’ll catch my eye or take my hand and nod vigorously like we are in on the same joke. Sometimes I almost think we are.

I think one of the worst feelings from watching her mind dissolve before our eyes is that we are watching our own memories disappear as well. We stare at her and realize only half of all our joint memories are left standing. All of our own memories that include my grandmother are weaker without her mind to help support them.

I know one day, before my grandmother is physically gone from this world, she’ll look at me and I will be mentally gone from hers. I know that one of the most horrible parts of dementia is that before you lose them, they lose you. They lose the Sunday morning car rides and the late night talks surrounded by chill and smoke. They lose feelings of heads on chests, hands in hands, lips on lips. Everything that had ever been built to last in their mind steadily crumbles.

But I think there is a reason we still celebrate this day even though my grandmother doesn’t know why. Maybe the crumbling is inevitable, but building those great memories in the first place isn’t. That was a choice. We can choose to not care anymore, to not build sandcastles that will only be swept away, or we can choose to build great things despite the impending destruction. I guess all I can hope for in my life is to make the kind of memories that would hurt to forget.