Frances, Before and After

This happened, just as I remember it.

Asleep, but barely, just before dawn, I waken from restless, hot flash riddled, troubled sleep by the sensation of someone sitting down on the bed next to me. I feel them, still, waiting, just fitting inside the fetal curve of my belly and legs. I think it is my husband come for his early morning goodbye kiss, but as my open eyes adjust it is clearly not him but a smaller person, a woman, my Grandma Frances. Only I am older and she is younger now.

She wears one of her simple shifts, plain black flats, her thin arms and legs bare and cold. She looks at me with purpose, deeply and intensely and she reaches out to gently pat and rub my arm. I look from her eyes to her arm to mine and try to stay present, because I know she is gone, many years prior, and she would rub her own arm in the same way as she sat and disappeared into her dementia.

After. She would shrivel into the rocker for hours, rubbing her arms, holding herself, trying to soothe herself, whisper it’s OK, it’s OK. Oh Look! Look! Look at him, see him? Don't You See Him? He’s right here, he’s right here on my arm, pinching me, pinching me, Ouch! He is a tricky little man. Don’t you see him?  You couldn't say he wasn't there, that only upset her more, made her eyes a little crazier. He's gone now, that's what you could say, and hope she changed the channel in her brain, hoped she could do anything ever again of her own free will. I would try to hug her and sometimes she ignored me and sometimes she'd smile and call me sweetie and sometimes she would look at me in terror or realization or regret, and a tear or two would slide down her cheek, and it is the saddest thing I can remember from my childhood, the scariest thing I know, that there were moments when she knew.

I know she is gone, and yet she is here, sitting on my bed. Not her disjointed, unsettled or agitated self. Her calm one, the one from before.

Before. I see her, in her kitchen, her dark hair lit from the afternoon sun. We picked strawberries from the field, not 10 yards from the window behind her. They were sweet and wonderful and so was she, so quiet and so kind. She rinsed the berries, topped them and dipped them wet into the sugar bowl, just for me because I adored sugar. She'd tell my mom it was ok, a little sugar never hurt anyone. It is one of my earliest and best memories.

She is here now, in this life she never knew. It makes no sense. Although her hair is neat and her eyes clear, like before, she does not smile. There is not joy, but sadness. She looks deep into my eyes and rubs my arm and says only I’m sorry. I’m so sorry sweetie. I cock my head to try and understand, to find words and look back up to her but she is gone. I am alone with the memory of her both before and after, and here and now, and she leaves a whiff of something sorrowful in the room.

By now I am fully awake, I lie exactly as in the dream - is that what it was? I stare at the indentation in the blankets, melancholy and confused. I think I understand the message she has given me, this apology for the genes she does not want to give me.

I hope I let her know somehow that it’s not her fault, it is no ones fault, it just is. Life isn't fair, and you don't get happy ever afters, you just get what you get, and if you're lucky, you get lucky.

I only wish I had more memories of her from before to lose in the first place. This is how I like to remember her best, even though I wasn't even born yet.

Frances Helena Campbell  1907-1972

xxoo

This Painting

My Grandmother painted this landscape on the back of an old metal sign. She was a beautiful woman, calm and loving and intelligent and talented. She sewed, embroidered, tatted, cooked, worked the farm and the animals, wrote beautiful letters...
and she painted.

She died at 63, after suffering several years of increasingly debilitating dementia, called Picks Disease, similar to Alzheimer's. It was horrifying and indescribable to watch as a child. It will probably be the last thing I forget about her.

This painting haunts me now, because it was a scene from her life and yet not, as the hills and foreboding came from what she saw in her mind; the trees and sheds from the back yard. The mountainous clouds seem to me an omen of something looming out there, unstoppable and unwelcome. I remember her both happy and whole, as well as fractured and frightful. I remember how unspeakably the cloud of her illness and the sheer loss of her covered our family. I wonder how it feels to someone unattached, untorn by the incompatible memories of the woman who inhabited this landscape.

There is no date on the painting, and I'm not sure if she painted it as a young woman before her mind fell apart, or once she began to sense herself slipping away. She was said to have the sight, as her mother before her and my mother before me. I have no such premonitions from beyond of things to come, as my ghosts come only from the past, with not even a hint of what's next, just what's likely, which is burden enough for me to bear.

I remember perfectly the look on her face the last time I tried to talk to her, to connect with the grandmother I adored, who adored me, as she careened wildly from giddy happiness, childish glee and silliness to confusion, anger and fear, when came suddenly that jolt of clarity, when she looked into my eyes deeply and I understood. My child's mind and memory are certain that she knew, that for a fleeting moment she was aware exactly what had happend to her; she surfaced for air only to know that she was drowning, slipping away into the labrynth of her mind. It is that moment of sentience, for both of us, that haunts me when I look at this painting. It would have been easier to lose her all at once,completely, and forever, than to have her look at me with those furious, desperate and infinitely sad eyes and have no comfort to give. To need comfort that could not be given.

It becalms me to look at this picture, of her before, and how she saw her life and her farm in happier times.

Frances Angelene Campbell Hickman

Beverly Farm, Maryland