Kartika_Issue15

ISSUE 15 | SPRING 2013
7.
Both etymologically and medically, dementia involves the loss of stuff. In
most cases, it’s the loss of rational cognition, almost always including a
nuanced definition of personality subtraction, the removal of some
quintessential aspect of the self, much like an excision of the spirit. In other
words, the person we know (or used to know) isn’t completely there
anymore: she’s on a leave of absence, a cognitive exile. This is the story of
how my grandmother inhabits two worlds at the same time, shuttling
between the Church of the A-Bomb and the Island of Sakura, flashing
between identities and continents in every complex chemical reaction in her
brain, traveling in the space between neurotransmitters and the half-life of
memory.
8.
Once my brother and I began taking over hospice duties for my grandmother,
I started reading brochures for end of life care. In one brochure, it said that
family members should show pictures of the dying person’s life to help her
digest its richness. With the right reader, every life was a rich
bildungsroman. I grabbed every musty, floral-themed album in my mom’s
apartment in Leucadia, led sobo over to the couch by the hand and then sat
down together with her. Photo by photo, page by page, album by album, I
replayed her life back to her: Obāsama, this is you in Paris with mom and
Dad. Oh, she said, surprised. This is you in London, I said. She nodded
like London was playing hide-and-go-seek with her memory. Grandmamma,
this is you in Hong Kong with mom, I said. She bent over the photograph,
looking for faces she understood. This is you in Ōsaka, I said. Oh, Ōsaka,
she repeated, like a word charm. This is you playing the piano at Mrs.
Kurtz’s piano recital, I said. In three hours, we soared through her life at
blinding speed, splicing a lifetime achievement montage that she soon forgot.
Part of me was devastated: this was her life in snapshot, collapsing into
snippets. She’d had a brutal life that got better over time, but now she didn’t
even remember what she’d overcome (a sexually abusive husband, a world
war, a broken-up Japanese family, an estranged daughter and the
institutionalized xenophobia of small town America). She was the very
definition of a survivor, and what’s worse, she no longer knew it. Still,
another part of me was envious: sobo gets to relive each seminal moment of
her life over again, for the first time, every joy is her first joy, every moment
is an eternity. And all of the pain, suffering and grief she’d experienced
since Japan became a radical experiment of radiation, democracy, cultural
translation and historical erasure was wiped clean. This is the story of how
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