Blog

food: some freshly baked cookies

TW: Death and Parkinson's

sorry for the disorganized rant I need to get this off.

I live in a different country than my grandparents, and so I don't see them much. I'm also a minor so I don't book my own plane tickets. She looked fine enough on calls, because she was always a little more feeble. It was only ever her head, and she was always bad with technology so my grandpa would hold the phone.

Nothing prepared me for who I met when my family came to visit this summer.

My mom seemed to want to come urgently, but I didn't know why. I postponed all my commitments to come, thinking that my mom just wanted to visit my older grandparents like usual.

When I arrived at my grandparent's house, I could already tell something was off with her. Her back was almost entirely hunched over, and she walked even slower than usual. Like she was always slow, but she was literally shaking and sliding her feet in tiny little steps to walk. She was so weak she couldn't get up from her chair after she sat down, no matter how much I helped her. She can barely form a proper sentence and rambles all the time.

Yesterday, me and my sisters went to a nearby ice cream shop and walked around the city for a few hours. When we came back, my grandma was crying and saying "is this you, you came back ok" and trying to hug us over and over again. Turns out she thought we got kidnapped, even though we had already told her we were going out.

I got scared shitless and started crying the moment I got away. This isn't the grandma I knew. I started suspecting she had some neurodegenerative disease or dementia on her own, and even guessed dementia or Alzheimer's. Nobody ever confirmed it to me, but I overheard my mom talking about Parkison's specialists and taking my grandma. That's literally the only reason I found out. I'm pretty sure it's late-stage too. Fear, delusion, complete loss of mobility. Everything lines up.

When my grandma and grandpa on my dad's side died, nobody said anything to me either. I vaguely remembered some hospital visits on the phone and then their funeral. That's all I got, and I only found out later through overhearing conversations that they had cancer (both of them from different types). I feel like I should've had some talk to or some warning about this. The unsureness is terrifying. I'm just trying to treat my grandma like usual. But I miss her. And I don't know anything about her anymore.

Would really like to buy it for my Girlfriend's birthday but I just can't track anything similar down.