Dichroic Reflections

family memory

There were some good things about this weekend's non-adventure. For one thing, I took along a sleeveless sweater I had started last fall and had abandoned in order to focus on gifts and then other projects. I've recently gotten back to it and had completed about half the first side when we left. I finished the first ball of yarn on Thursday's drive (this is why it was a good thing we turned back to get more yarn) and by the end of the trip had finished that side and gotten nearly halfway through the other. Now I have confidence that I can finish this, which is always a nice thing.

I think I may do another sleeveless sweater next. Given the combination of hot climate and (sometimes over-)air-conditioned office, I wear them a lot. I'd like to do the next one in the round; I haven't seen any patterns for sleeveless sweaters done that way, so I may either adapt a pattern from the Yarn Girls' book or make a top-down raglan and stop with cap sleeves instead of continuing the sleeves on down. I think that would look good in a rustic slubby sort of yarn. (Or if anyone has a pattern to recommend....)

Even better was the time we got to spend with Rudder's grandparents. His grandmother has some fairly severe Alzheimers or similar memory loss (I think they said it wasn't Alzheimers but the practical result is the same), and has been getting worse fairly rapidly in the last couple of years. It was good to spend time with her before it gets worse, and good to give Rudder's grandfather a break where he could get out, talk to other people, and have someone to help watch and talk to her.

She's still able to reason, though her memory is pretty far gone, which means that she has no idea (I don't think) who we are but is able to figure out that we must be family. On Friday evening, she walked into the bedroom when she wanted to get a glass of water, and had to be directed to go to the fridge instead. I couldn't tell whether she recognized the restaurant we ate in, though it's been in Sacramento as long as they've lived there and they used to eat there when they lived in the neighborhood (this would have been the 1970s and possibly the 60s). Several times she got into the back instead of the front seat of their car. At one point she called Rudder by his uncle's name (her son's) which seems like a good guess, though it's also not clear if she normally remembers names. The most interesting thing, from a cognitive perspective, is that her personality is still the same, despite the memory loss. She talks a lot less, but when she does, she still likes to be dogmatic and forceful as ever. She just lacks specific nouns. So she'll make statements like, "What you need to do, is to do that and then the other thing," or will finish statements with gestures, like miming eating while we were talking about Rudder and his grandfather bringing back the food. It was fascinating, and in some ways a little less sad than it would otherwise have been because she so clearly is still the same person she was. Of course, this is much easier on me, who met her as an adult, than it is on Rudder's mother and her sibs, and I expect the family gathering this summer will be both sad and happy. Rudder and I will probably be the ones playing with the little kids and telling stories to the not-so-littles. Some of those stories will definitely be about the grandparents, since I think only the oldest of the next generation will have any memory of their grandmother as she was, and the youngest of the grandchildren (now in college or recently graduated) didn't get to see those grandparents all that often.