Travels in a Far Country

My grandfather says night time is the worst time. He's talking about the way my grandmother gets up and wanders, the way she asks questions, and the way she worries. For some months now, she has believed that the home where they've lived for the last twelve years is temporary. She thinks they are always traveling, here and there, and that some of her belongings are somewhere else. When I ask, "Where?" she waves her hand and shrugs, "I don't know. Somewhere."

Yesterday when I visited with my grandparents, my grandmother said she was "blue." I asked why and she said that she hadn't heard from her family, that her folks didn't have a telephone. This kind of thing makes my grandfather, former navy-man and boss-man and generally an in-charge kind of man, crazy. "You know your mama and daddy died 15-20 years ago," he hollered at her from the kitchen. She shrugged and looked at me with her pale blue eyes. "I don't remember."

I know, grandma. If you don't remember something, you can't say that it happened. If you don't remember something, it's like it never happened. Life flows on. Time pulls us forward. My grandmother is like a naked castaway on a tiny raft, waves crashing over her. She doesn't remember. It never happened. This is survival stripped down to bare necessities.

My husband and I have been back in FL for a little more than five years now. When I think back to those early days and the time I spent with my grandmother, it seems I was with a different person. She has never been a brave soul, but she was delighted when, at age 80, I took her through her first automatic car wash. We used to take shopping trips to Wal-Mart and have lunch at a big buffet where she would eat chicken potpie and a whole plate of dessert. Now, she says she's never been there. Now, it's harder to get her to eat at all. Even her legendary sweet tooth is starting to fade. Nothing tastes good. She has no appetite.

Years before that, my grandparents traveled. Every summer for ten years or so they would hightail it to Alaska in their motor home. Grandpa would fish for salmon and halibut, cheek by jowl, with dozens of other fisherman, and at the end of the day he set up his cooker and canned what he'd caught. Before that, my grandparents went to Hawaii and visited me once in Oregon. And way back they went to the U.S.S.R before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They cruised the Danube and watched castles float past. They were travelers and they have the photographs to prove it.

Sometimes, grandpa will talk about those trips, but not so often now. Now, he is older and in more pain; he's traded many of his former activities so he can worry about my grandmother. She is still traveling, but now it seems cruelly ironic. She doesn't want to subscribe to any new magazines because she doesn't know how long they will be here. They keep moving around, she says, going from place to place.

In the country of the old, things keep changing. You would think that the view is eternal. What you see is what you get forever. But no, the restless mind turns like a dog in its bed before sleep, round and round, seeking comfort.

The best I can do is tell my grandmother that it doesn't matter. The things that she can't remember aren't important. She knows her husband, her family, me, still. She is lightening the load for the final journey. What do we need to remember for that?

Only that we loved and were loved.