the notebook…yes, that one.

We’re making plans to visit my grandparents. Sooner rather than later.

Until last year I traveled to the States twice a year, each Spring and Summer, to spend a month with them at their home in Iaeger, West Virginia. Racked up air miles like nobody’s business and went to bed feeling not-so-bad that I missed out on a holiday in the Maldives.

Over the past 12 months I’ve visited more frequently. But it’s always been in dribs and drabs. A weekend here. A few days there. Never that solid month where we could get down to business peeling potatoes and painting porches. I promised Pa over Christmas that I’d be back in February to spend good quality time. Hopefully a whole week.

I told him I’d arrange all of their hospital visits so that I could attend and I’d bring him more of that fancy English chocolate he likes so well. He said to be sure to bring The Euro too because that Euro makes the best coffee I ever had. My grandmother agreed and added he cooks better than a woman!

My grandmother has dementia and Pa is her only carer. Things like freshly brewed coffee and roast dinners are meaningful to them; and since neither enjoy the physicians’ visits that a chronic illness requires, both appreciate the time I spend flirting with, and getting to know, her 72 year old doctor.

Growing up I got most of what was meaningful to me from my grandmother. Pa was a bit of a superhero to be applauded and adored. But it was my grandmother who was always present…teaching me things like how to sit like a lady and how to be me no matter what. Even though Pa remains, hands down, the best story teller I’ve ever met, it was my grandmother who loved words. Who spent years of her life putting them down on paper.

She published four books of poetry in her more youthful years and last summer she took me into a spare bedroom and introduced me to a dozen or so voluminous notebooks made up of short stories and poems and bits of her memoir. She had organised them by the decades of her life. She handed me a dull blue one and said “I don’t remember these, but it says I wrote them in my thirties. That’s how old you are, right?”

I haven’t read the notebook yet. Because I break out bawling every time I touch the spine. Then I think about that novel by Nicholas Sparks. The movie with my favourite little fellow, Gosling. How I never understood the appeal that warranted a million dollar advance. Until my grandma began to forget. Then it all made sense.

7 Responses to “the notebook…yes, that one.”

1. David says:

   15 January, 2009 at 21:53

   She’s so cute. And I do hope that someday you will get the strength to read her notebooks and share her story and her wisdom with the world.
2. better safe than sorry says:

   16 January, 2009 at 3:11

   i never read the book but i saw the movie when it came out, i thought it was a love story, i had no idea that it dealt with dementia. i tried to get my best friend to come and see it with me, but her mother was in the beginning stages of alzhemiers and she wasn’t sure she would be able to handle watching what her mother and herself would eventually be going through. i think it made me watch the movie entirely different.
3. Ben says:

   17 January, 2009 at 0:49

   I’m going through the same thing with my 88 year old grandmother, who lives 2000 miles away. I wish I had something of hers such as a notebook or diary she’d kept since before her illness. I always said I’d write to her in the years after my grandfather died. I never did. Now that her illness is so advanced I feel I’ve missed that opportunity.
4. JPFanshawe says:

   20 January, 2009 at 16:12

   Wow. That really is all that comes to mind. Wow…to have such a boon handed to you, to have the chance to see someone you know and love in a whole new light, from the very moment when she was your age…I am green with envy, but wonder, why would your grandmother never have shared them with her own children? Perhaps a story in that, as well…
5. steph says:

   21 January, 2009 at 17:33

   *sniff*
6. Nikol says:

   22 January, 2009 at 21:19

   Wow. You are unbelievably lucky to have her words. Enjoy! That is, once you are able to open the notebooks…
7. patty says:

   30 April, 2009 at 22:22

   maybe she sees the same love for words in you
8. and in the end, despair - plain simple english says:

   15 January, 2011 at 0:02

   [...] knew. She must have [...]