The unretrievable
A record of my grandma, in the absence of others
Last week my mum sent me a Facebook message to tell me that my grandma has dementia. Dementia is so common among the grandparents of my friends, has become such a standard topic of conversation, that it surprised me to remember this is the first time a blood relative of mine has been diagnosed. The diagnosis itself wasn’t surprising. Her moods have been erratic since my granddad died four years ago, can now shift from calm through anxiety and anger to despair and back again in the time it takes the kettle to boil. Still, for a long time I thought it was grief, proof of the strange ways in which it can manifest, must manifest when you lose such a fixture of your physical as well as emotional environment. When my granddad was alive the two of them were always sat in adjacent armchairs. It is possible the grief was a factor. Stress can contribute to dementia, and I suppose grief is a kind of stress, or becomes one after you’ve passed the temporal threshold at which others expect you to go back to normal. Mémé never really went back to normal.
I’ve written about Mémé before. In that piece, as in my head, she appears as an exclusively old thing, a relic of events that took place at a historical distance, now sort of hunched under the weight of time. Sometimes I have to remind myself that that hunching is recent. She was young, or youngish, for a lot longer than I’ve known her as old. I’ve always meant to write about her as this younger person. Most people probably think their grandparents’ stories are special, and all of them are right, but Mémé’s arc has a particularly dramatic trajectory: the childhood in wartime France, the jealous stepmother who sent her away, the meet-cute at a ball on a ship in Hong Kong, the suburban English family with its own muffled tensions. In the novelised retelling of her life the death of my uncle, her son, after his own long illness, would be the climax, before the consclusion of her quieting years as that local celebrity, the vicar’s wife. I once told my other grandma that I wanted to write a novel at some point. She asked why I would write about anything other than Mémé.
During Covid I started interviewing Mémé about her experiences. We did two ninety-minute calls, one in which we discussed her earliest memories and the Exodus, one in which we talked about life with her father and stepmother after the war. We reached the point of her arrival in Britain at sixteen. I saved recordings of the calls as MP3 files on my laptop. Then lockdown lifted, and I got a job writing about politics, which I considered then to be not more important, exactly, but bigger than individual lives. The interviews stopped. Two years ago my bag, which contained that laptop, was stolen from under a table in a pub in Soho, and because I hadn’t backed up the first two recordings I lost those as well. I’ve always assumed that I’ll restart the project one day, and maybe that’s still true: Reminiscence Therapy is a tool in dementia management, and maybe these conversations could constitute a mutually beneficial form. Or maybe the memories will be too patchy, the attempts to retreive them too agitating. Maybe picturing myself as a kind of therapeutic practitioner is just a version of the hope everyone experiences when someone they love is suffering, that they’ll be the one capable of making it stop.
If it limits the suffering, is it better to let the story — its detailed, first-hand telling — slip away? My partner’s granddad has dementia, too. When I ask him how he is he says he’s mostly calm, that his impression of his location or the date or the identities of those around him are skewed but it doesn’t appear to worry him. We agree — I think anyone would agree — that this is a better existence. Memory, for all its creative power, is first of all a practical tool for orientation in the world, in relationships, and if your state of being cared-for, that kind of benevolent captivity, doesn’t require you to use it then maybe there’s no immediate harm in its loss. The worst pain, as people point out, sometimes belongs to the onlookers. I wonder if that’s because it makes us feel unstuck in time, too, to find ourselves absent from someone else’s historical landscape. We also depend on each other’s memories to know ourselves, to feel ourselves as things in context. Aspects of Mémé — her first words, her favourite toy as a toddler — have been gone for decades already.
What scares me more than the gaps are the things that fill them. I always find the word “dementia” cruel: it sounds like some medieval portmanteau of “demon” and “torment”, and there’s no actual etymological connection, but still — when I hear “dementia” I see the Furies harrassing Orestes. I see the carers and nurses at Mémé’s bedside the way she sometimes sees them, in her paranoia, sinister and strange, tasked with doing her violence by some inescapable higher authority. Guilt, the Furies’ psychological referent, and dementia do have a relationship, in the fact of memory behaving badly, in the eating-away of the sense of historically or morally continuous self. Can you keep thinking of yourself as a good person when you’ve done a bad thing? Can you keep thinking of yourself as someone who loves somebody, loves them well, if you fail to capture every facet of them while you can, to protect them against that more profound self-loss, to do everything possible to hold them in place? I think I’ll always be purused by this, my little matricide. I think it’ll always feel like a sin. “That’s what happens when people die,” Yael van der Wouden writes in The Safekeep. “They take themselves with them and you never ever find out anything new about them ever.”
Mémé won’t care. She’s never asked about what I did with those first interviews or whether there will be more. I don’t think she’s ever seen herself the way we see her, as the protagonist of an important story. I doubt protagonists ever do. My knowledge of her life rubs up against the reality of the individual I’ve always known, someone modest and settled and domestic, focused on the performance of small, practical acts of affection, lifts to the train station, keeping the biscuit tin full. Part of me thinks my interest in the other version is a kind of sickness produced by consuming too many stories, a selfish urge to manipulate her existence into narrative convention, to make her a character rather than a person. But then narrativising is also an act of tribute. Funeral euologies serve more than an informational purpose: they acknowledge a life, give it meaning, resolution, which the anticlimax of death alone denies. Narrative convention is convention in part because it reflects truth. Events take place in response to one another. Tension builds and is released.
The only thing truly artificial about resolution as it exists in fiction is the fact that those resolutions last forever. In reality the cycle of pressure is always revolving, one bigger or smaller problem — war, family breakdown, a shitty boss, an argument over the washing up, a grim diagnosis, regret, anger, grief — constantly moving towards its peak. Those peaks give way to either continuity and rupture. Bits of ourselves come forward with us. Others are left behind. It was my birthday a few days after I heard about the diagnosis, and for the first time Mum wrote the text of my card from Mémé. Mémé just signed it: the handwriting was shaky, but it said her name.