Happy Birthday Nana

Today my Nana turns 91 years old. Her mind is mostly gone to dementia. Her body is frail, but generally healthy. As I think of her today, so many memories come to me.

A few years ago I drove by the house she lived in when I was growing up. It’s a small house on a small lake in an even smaller town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. The house looked tiny, shabby, nothing like the rustic home I spent so many weekends in during my childhood. I remembered it being so much bigger, a virtual four-season playground. In the summer there was the lake, the sand, the trees, the rocks, the parades, the boating and the campfires. In the winter there was ice skating, snowman-building, sledding and an amazing ice sculpture festival. In 1980, the Olympic Torch passed through her town on its way to Lake Placid. My parents took me out of school so we could see it and I got the autographs of all the torch-runners. (Note: I still have that paper with the autographs and I put little notes next to some of the sigs. One says “HOT!” with an arrow. Heh.)

I remember her attic. It was a hot, stuffy attic that you could barely stand upright in, yet in my eyes it was full of boxes of treasure. Her bathtub had some sort of radiant heating to keep you warm in the deep freeze of winter in the Adirondacks. Her drawers were full of cosmetics that I was often allowed to experiment with.

And for some reason I will always remember a plaque on the bathroom wall that said “Only that dawns to which we are awake.”

We watched Lawrence Welk and Shirley Temple together. We danced. We baked cookies. She always had Haagen Dazs ice cream in her freezer. Rum Raisin was her favorite.

My Nana was a waitress most of her life - the perfect profession for her in my eyes. She was outgoing and happy and could make friends with anyone, anywhere. She had three children. Her eldest son and daughter lived a good distance away and we saw them a couple times a year. Sometimes less. She was divorced and spent a lot of time with her sister, my great aunt who I have equally fond memories of spending time with. But it was my father - her baby - who was always around and always took care of her.

She moved to Florida when I was a teenager. I didn’t see her much after that, a few vacations and the occasional holiday when she would visit her family in the northeast.

Her sister passed. Her daughter passed. She grew older and spent a lot of time alone in her depression and grief. Until finally she could no longer safely care for herself. She’s now in a nursing home near my Dad, who is still taking care of her with the help of his wife and family.

I don’t come from an especially close family. We live far apart, seeing one another a few times a year at the most. We don’t talk on the phone every week or even every month. I wish I were closer. Able to see Nana - and my whole family - more, able to have had my kids spend a few years with her before the dementia took over. Able to have my own kids spend weekend after weekend with their grandparents.

Having these kinds of memories requires two things: time together and love. I’m glad I had that time with my Nana. And I hope to keep my children and grandchildren close as the years go by. That’s what my memories of my Nana have taught me.

Today I wonder what goes on in her mind. We don’t really know, after all. Is her mind blank? Or is she remembering more than we know, albeit in a jumbled-up way that can’t quite be formulated into thoughts and words and names at the appropriate time? She can’t place me when she sees my photo, but maybe somewhere in her mind there is a memory.

While she remembers and recognizes little, I am sending Nana this letter anyway. Perhaps some of my words will spark a memory. And she will know that I love her.