To My Grandmother Whom I Adored

If you watched a cartoon where an old lady in a housecoat hit her head on a frying pan, did a spit-take and slowly slunk to the ground, it would look pretty funny. The real life version of it kind of freaked me out.

That really happened to my grandmother. Honestly, the physical mishaps my grandmother has gone through remind me of O.J. Simpson at the beginning of “The Naked Gun.” And most were a product one specific trait that she has exercised like no one I’ve ever known outside of Washington, D.C.

Stubbornness.

Sometimes I think looking at traits in parents and their children is like looking at one of those 70’s pictures where you have to blur your eyes to maybe see an image. You see what you want to see whether it’s really there or not. Let’s say I grabbed a 35 year-old man and a completely unrelated twelve year-old boy and stuck them in front of a focus group. I gave the group no information other than that they are father and son. Within two hours the group would produce a laundry list of the ways the kid acted like the adult. We want to see the similarities, so the inherited traits magically appear. The truth is any behavioral similarities between kids and parents are more likely caused by exposure rather than genetics. I have to believe that. I have no choice. Otherwise I’m destined to be a dick.

My father and his mom are a perfect example of that. As my grandmother has gotten older, any question I’ve ever had about her past has been answered. I’ve filled in gaps of things I didn’t understand when I was a kid. And not through some heartfelt sessions of late life confidence (this isn’t “Tuesdays with Louise”). It’s through simple observation.

As she’s gotten older, Louise has done what all people do when they get old: She’s become a more concentrated version of herself. Some people say that the elderly do away with all the bullshit niceties that young people put up with every day, and as a result their behavior is simpler or more raw or just plain crotchety. I think the change is a little more layered than that.

Most elderly people live a life of relative isolation. They don’t interact with nearly as many people every day as they did when they were younger. And without that you lose a sense of the triggers that keep your personality in check. I can’t say that or the waitress will spit in my food. My secretary will slap me. The 300 pound guy in line in front of me will kick my ass. Absent those triggers long enough, old people are free to be selfish, stubborn, overly emotional, annoyed, racist and sexually vulgar. They have nothing to lose. Except visits from their family.

Where 40 year-old Louise got to show her stubborn side maybe 10% of the time, 85 year-old Louise is all stubborn all the time. Stubborn to the point of occasionally delusional.

After spending time in a rehab facility recovering from a broken ankle, she was forced to use a wheelchair for several months because the muscles in her legs and feet had atrophied so badly. Her spine had curved because the muscles in her back were so weak. From time to time, she needed help getting in and out of her favorite chair. Yet she announced to me one day that if a man were to attack her, she’d do like her mother said and “kick him in the nuts.” The producers of “Murderball” are waiting to film that, grandma.

The details surrounding her broken ankle are cloudy. I grilled my grandparents about this as if I had them handcuffed to the center of a table. Louise is selective with the truth when it will either 1) embarrass her or 2) prove her wrong in any way. And grandpa is just plain crazy. Actually, “crazy” doesn’t give him his due. I’ll try to explain.

When normal people communicate, it starts with ideas floating in their heads. These ideas head down a chamber where they are sorted and parsed into well-formed thoughts. These thoughts are then translated into words and spoken to someone. With my grandfather, the brain skips the middle step, and the ideas get shoehorned into words that don’t quite fit. No parsing. No sorting. Just this diarrhea of words. And because no one ever understands what he means, over the years the diarrhea has become more and more frustrated and more and more angry.

The story starts in Louise’s bedroom. Grandma and grandpa have had separate rooms my entire life. (Weird. I know. But I learned at a young age that this relationship was just too crazy to question details like these). And because they didn’t like each other that much anymore, grandma would wake up and make breakfast for herself while grandpa was still asleep. She would drink her coffee, read the paper, and then return to her room before he woke up. At night, she would wait until he had retired for the night before making herself a plate and enjoying dinner. I knew all of this because grandpa would complain to me about it while grandma sat two feet away at the other side of the table.

Depending on who you believe, grandpa hadn’t seen Louise either 1) all day today or 2) for THREE FULL DAYS. Her bedroom door had been closed the entire time. He called her phone to see if she was okay, but she didn’t answer. Finally, somehow as a last resort, he knocked, and she called out to him. He found her lying on the floor with forensic evidence that she had been there quite a while. He was afraid to move her, so he called 911, and paramedics from the Fire Department responded. They got her to a seated position, cleaned her up and checked her out. She was a little sore, but otherwise fine.

Standing in their living room a couple of hours after the paramedics left, I tried to engage my grandmother, who stared off into the distance, frustrated that we were making such a big deal about her fall. To her credit, she was fine. You know, greatest generation and all. She said she woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and her leg buckled. She contends that it had happened the prior night, so she had been on the floor for about 12 hours. According to my grandfather it was much longer than that.

Louise says that at some point she heard him in the basement below her room talking to a man from the oil company. Grandpa says that was during the day on Thursday. He found her Friday afternoon. My math might be faulty here, but that means that Louise was on the floor for roughly 60 hours. And from the report of the condition in which they found her, I am inclined to agree. And all because she was too stubborn and prideful to call out for help.

But Louise was still mad. She did not want to hear this onslaught of diarrhea about how she needed help taking care of herself. She had taken care of herself her entire life, and she wasn’t going to stop now. I argued with her. My grandfather argued with her. She was stubborn, and she won.

Two weeks later, she fell again, breaking both bones in her lower leg. Luckily, this time it happened in the living room for grandpa to see. He called me at work. He was afraid an ambulance would take too long, so he wanted to drive her. I came right away and found him spraying WD-40 on her leg.

“It’s ice cold, so it numbs it,” he explained. Got it. My grandfather is Hank from “Royal Pains.”

At the hospital, the doctors found my grandmother a mess of disrepair. Things I asked her about every week, things she said were okay, simply weren’t. She had sores on her feet. She had toenails overgrown to Discovery Channel proportions. She was incontinent. Her legs had no muscle mass from sitting all day. And after surgery to put metal plates in her leg, the doctor told me her bones were so soft that it was like “trying to put screws in butter.”

And she was simply too stubborn to tell me that anything was wrong. But she had a running history of that.

Dateline 2009. During a weekend visit, Louise proudly showed me her statement from a department store credit card. She’d had the card for decades, but because she didn’t get around as well as she used to, I knew she hadn’t been there in years.

“Do you see how much credit I have?” she beamed. “That’s because I’ve been a loyal customer.” I looked at the statement. It didn’t have a line about total credit. But it had a balance, and that was over $2,000. I explained that to her, but she didn’t understand. She confirmed that she hadn’t been to the store in years. I asked for everything: cards statements, bank statements, canceled checks. It turned out that the shifty folks at store card HQ had activated every add-on possible for the card: credit protection, identity theft protection, debt relief. All totaling about $80 per month in charges. And as grandma dutifully paid the minimum each month, the balance ballooned in less than three years to the point she was writing checks for over $100 each month with nothing but Social Security for income. Lesson learned? The same thing happened to her bank card two years later.

Dateline 1999. My dad was no longer welcome in my grandparents’ home. That had happened years earlier, but my sister and I never understood why. Until the time I was a pre-teen, my sister and I spent Saturday nights at my grandparents’ house. After my parents divorced, my dad was never welcome any place we lived. I remember my sister and I often had conversations with him at the curb. For a couple of years he got to see us by coming to my grandparents’ for breakfast on Sunday mornings. He’s stay for a couple of hours, watch some TV with us, and then Louise would walk him out.

One Sunday my grandfather, his stepfather, met him at the door and told him to leave. My sister and I were sitting at the dining room table, the two of them standing about three feet apart, face-to-face at the door of the nearby hallway.

“It’s not going on any longer. Take it out of here. Not in my house,” my grandfather kept saying. We had no idea what he was talking about. My grandmother was obviously very upset. But I was 12, my sister was 14. They weren’t going to take the time to explain things to us. Years later, as part of other revelations, I found out that my grandmother was giving my dad money every week. This obviously threw into question whether the visits were for quality time or just for a cash withdrawal.

Even later we found out that my dad had a drug problem — the type of problem that co-opts the earnings of a truck driver. So he supplemented his income by taking money from his mother, whose sole income before retiring came from taking care of someone’s kids. This went on for years.

Years later, while she was in the hospital recovering from her broken ankle, I poured over all of her financial information; shoeboxes and plastic bags filled with receipts, statements and bills. Tucked among them were a series of canceled checks from 1999 from her to my father, 14 years after my grandfather threw him out, and at least five years after we as a family acknowledged that past money had been for drugs.

My relationship with my grandmother is so much different from the way she perceives it. She thinks (at least I believe she does) that she has been an example of strength. And to an extent, she has. She was a single parent at a time when it was hard for a black woman to provide for just for herself alone. She formed 25 year relationships with two separate families, raising their children. But at the same time, whenever that strength waned, the illusion of it had to stand at all costs. Even if that meant not being honest with the people closest to her. She exerted such control over her immediate surroundings, almost as if to protect herself. But as time passed, fewer and fewer actual people were there.

When I was a small child, I thought my grandmother was the most together person I knew. Her house was spotless. The furniture was nice. She was smart. She read us books at night. My sister helped her with crossword puzzles on Sundays. We had toys and games that we all played together. One Saturday afternoon when I was six, my sister and I were eating sandwiches at the kitchen table while Louise cooked. She was wearing a housecoat, slipper and a kerchief around her head. Sharon and I were singing the theme to a lame Disney movie called “Unidentified Flying Oddball.” After maybe the fourth round of singing it, Louise made a weird noise. We both looked over and her face froze, her eyes crossed. We laughed, thinking she was making funny faces to play with us. But suddenly her weight flung back and her head smashed against a cast iron frying pan hanging on a hook on the wall, and she slid slowly to a seating position on the ground. She was completely unconscious, save for a bubbly sound from her lips. Neither Sharon or I cried, but we stood a few lengths away calling our grandmother over and over. She didn’t answer. My grandfather was at work, and we didn’t know the number. But my sister was smart enough to call my dad. And then she went to see if any of the neighbors in the building were home. I remember sitting on the floor by the front door, at the end of the long hallway with the kitchen at the far end, waiting for Sharon to get back.

When dad got there, Louise was waking up. He helped her to a chair in the living room, and he tried to talk to her. She didn’t remember what happened. But she knew him, and she knew my sister. She knew my sister was her granddaughter, but didn’t know her name. She didn’t know me at all. The paramedics arrived and talked to her some more. The dog started barking at the strangers in the house, and she called him by name to calm down. They wanted to take her to the hospital, but she said she wouldn’t go unless she could get dressed properly.

So many years later, I’m the one who gets the calls that something is wrong, not my dad. Like the call about the broken ankle. And the call about the broken hip two years later. A few months removed from hip surgery, and maybe a week since she was discharged from a rehab facility, Louise was getting used to life back at home. She came out of her first rehab stint two years earlier strong than she had been in years. But this time she didn’t improve. She needed help doing everything. I visited one Saturday and talked to both of them about how they were coping. She was unhappy, but accepting help, which she needed because she wasn’t even able to stand from a chair by herself.

About five hours later, my grandfather called me at home to tell me that she had fallen again. She tried to transfer to her wheelchair when he was out of the room, and fell straight on her side. He was afraid to lift her up by himself. When I got back there, he had stationed a couple of pillows and cushions to make her comfortable. I managed to lift her, but because she couldn’t put weight on her left leg, I had to scoop underneath to rest her in the wheelchair. My hand planted on her butt, I got my first encounter with a fully loaded adult diaper. She thanked me, barely hiding how frustrated and mortified she was. A moment later she laughed a short little chuckle with a sigh. And for a brief moment, she seemed as if maybe she too was tired of fighting. Not brave fighting. Stubborn fighting. Fighting against what’s best for her simply because it’s not what she wants to do.

Two weeks later grandpa and I forced her to go to a podiatrist. Grandpa was convinced it was a callous on the sole of her foot that made her fall when she broke her hip. She kept saying no, but now we had made her. It took all of his medical training for the doctor not to say “What the FUCK?” when he examined her feet.

“You’re gonna be amazed when you see this,” he said to me as I waited outside the examination room. He had a scalpel in his hand. About five minutes later I heard a clank. Plopped into a metal bowl was a mass of dried and knotted rock hard skin the size of a jawbreaker. “That was in the sole of her foot,” he said. “It had to have been growing for years.”

Maybe we didn’t turn that corner after all.