“Okay, if you’re sure? I don’t mind hanging around.”
“No, honestly, it’s fine. I’m fine,” I stress at her dubious expression. “I’m exhausted so I think I might try to sneak in a quick nap before he wakes up.” These are the magic words. Not wanting to inconvenience me, she relaxes into her decision as I release her from her guilt.
“Okay, I’ll leave you to it. Call me if you need me. Don’t just say you will, then not do it. Actually do it. Any time.” She gives me a stern look, knowing me well. She makes this offer and threat every day; but still I’ve never called her, even when I could use the help. Even when I could use someone to talk to. Someone who recognized me for me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say with a mock salute.
“Behave.” Her eyes soften in fondness as she walks to the door and puts on her coat. Freya lives about 20 miles away in the nearest town to us, while central San Diego is only about an hour and a half drive away. We’re not far from civilization, but when you literally can’t see the forest for the trees, it sometimes seems like it. “I’ll be back tomorrow at 10 a.m., okay?”
“That’s great.” I open the door and walk her to her car.
She surprises me by turning around at the last minute and giving me a tight hug. She’s short, only coming up to my shoulder, but her embrace is stronger than I would’ve thought possible. “You take care of yourself. You’re doing such a good job. I know he won’t ever say it, so I’ll say it for him, and for me. You’re an incredible young man and I’m so proud of you. Be proud of yourself.”
I’m taken aback by her actions and her words. She doesn’t know it, but they mean everything to me.
I can’t remember the last time someone hugged me. I was always a tactile child, and my mother in particular loved to shower me with affection. One of the things I remember most about her was how she would smother me with kisses and cuddles. Her long blonde hair would tickle the side of my face as she hugged me. And my father would hold me steady and safe as I sat, proud, on his shoulders.
I never doubted I was loved, treasured, and wanted.
Even my grandfather, despite being a gruff man of few words, was liberal with embraces and encouragement before he forgot who I was. But when he stopped recognizing me, the praise and physical contact went along with his memory.
I resist the temptation to sink into Freya’s arms and never let go. I blink hard several times, fighting back the tears that are trying to fall in reaction to the unfamiliar event of hearing kind words. As if she knows this, she tightens her hold further. Her words are the reassurance I didn’t even know I was looking for.
At fourteen, I was unprepared for Alzheimer’s. I didn’t even know how to spell it, let alone what it was. And six years later, I still wake up every day not knowing what I’m doing. If I’m helping. Or hurting.
That’s not true. I’m definitely hurting.
To hear a trained professional say I’m doing okay soothes and settles something inside me. It makes me want to believe her, and I haven’t wanted anything for myself for a long time.
Although I could stay like this forever, I know it isn’t possible, so I’m the first to pull away. “Thank you,” I tell her. I don’t know how else to express my gratitude for what just occurred. Those two words just don’t seem like enough.
Her gaze is knowing as she rests her hand on my cheek before leaning on her tiptoes to kiss it. “You’re welcome, dearest boy,” she says before climbing into her Jeep and driving down the winding forest path without another word.
I watch as she disappears, and linger long after. When my legs begin to ache, I realize I can’t stand staring into the nothingness for eternity. I’m hungry and my grandfather will be awake soon so I head back inside to eat whatever Freya has made in solitude and silence.
As I’m eating, I look around our large wooden cabin. Another floor exists above us, but I had to install a large locked gate to prevent my grandfather from having access to it in case he falls down the stairs.
My room used to be upstairs, but I’ve moved downstairs into the room next to my grandfather’s, so I can hear any movements he makes. I’ve become a light sleeper after he left the house one night and started to wander through the woods.
It’s only due to luck or divine intervention that I’d woken up to have a drink of water and saw him out of the kitchen window barefoot in his pajamas. Trying to coax him back into the house when he didn’t even know who I was, or who he was for that matter, was an experience I never want to repeat.
The whole house has been childproofed over the years. There are covers over the sockets, locks on all of the windows and doors, and soft closing cabinets to prevent him from hurting himself in a moment of confusion.
My heart never healed after the death of my parents, but what little was left of it has been completely and utterly broken from seeing such a fiercely autonomous and resilient man being reduced to dependence and confusion over childproof-locks. Photos of my parents and my grandfather’s friends used to be on the walls and counters, but I had to take them down after they distressed him when he didn’t recognize anyone in the images.
He’s in the final and worst stages of the disease. He is no longer the man who raised me. The man I admired. My best friend. My everything. My hero.
But whoever he is, I cannot abandon him in his hour of need. Many people would have sent someone in his condition to a nursing home, but I could never do it. This has been his home for almost sixty years. He has loved, lost, and lived within these walls. When he was first diagnosed and still lucid, he made me promise never to make him leave it. He wanted to die here. And he raised me to be honorable, so I’ll live up to my word. If for no other reason than as a tribute to him.
TUCKING MY GRANDFATHER into bed later that night, I lean over and kiss him on the forehead as his wrinkly-lidded eyes close. I look up at the digital clock horizontal above his head with a mixture of sadness and relief. Sadness that he will soon leave me in this world alone. Relief that his suffering will soon be over.
He wouldn’t want to be the person he’s become. I want him to find peace. To be reunited with my grandmother, my parents, and his fallen friends, wherever it is good people go when they die. I’d rather have one more angel than have to look at the ghost of my grandfather every day. 9 months, 4 days, 12 hours, 36 minutes, 21 seconds until the last link to my past leaves me to face a future without him.
Sighing, my gaze falls on my grandfather’s antique gold stopwatch, resting on his nightstand. I lean over and pick it up, my palm sinking under its solid weight.
He’s carried it around with him for as long as I can remember, but he’s become particularly attached to it over the past few weeks. I guess it reminds him of his past, which at the moment he believes to be his present. He carries it everywhere and tells me the story of how he acquired it daily as if it’s for the first time. As if he’s eighteen and just opening a present from his father back in Norway. He’s fascinated with the progression of time and stares at the watch for hours.
I’ve had to take it into town to have the batteries changed twice already. The quick hands are ominous in their spinning, bringing us ever closer to the final goodbye. I press the button to halt time, feeling for a second as if I truly have the power to do that. If only.
“It always comes back to T.I.M.E.”
Placing it back on his nightstand, I tiptoe over to the door, making sure there are no hazards in his path should he wake up in the middle of the night.
“Pappa?” His small, groggy voice breaks through the darkness causing me to freeze my movements.
“Pappa?” he asks again in Norwegian, the only language he speaks these days, “Story? Please?”
Remember when I said I had no pieces of my heart left to break? I was wrong. My chest aches as they shatter, slicing my skin from the inside.
He thinks I’m his father. And that he’s a small boy.
Earlier this evening, he thought I was a younger version of
himself and he was one of his teenage friends. Hearing him call me, Jürgen, his name, was like a stab to the stomach. But I carried on the charade. He becomes too upset and confused if you contradict him. Freya and I both learned a long time ago to play along. He often mistakes her for my mother, Astrid.
Sometimes, he thinks I’m a son he never had. My mother was an only child.
Sometimes, he thinks I’m a total stranger. Those days are the worst.
I am no longer Tristan, his grandson. I haven’t been him for a while.
I am whoever he wants me to be. And sometimes I am unwanted.
Taking a moment to compose myself, I will the tears away for the second time that day. Clearing my throat, I glance back at him over my shoulder to see him peek out from under the covers in hopeful excitement. He looks five, instead of seventy-five.
“Sure,” I tell him, making my way back over to the bed and sitting next to him as he burrows closer to me, closing his eyes in contentment.
And through a voice hoarse with unshed tears and unexpressed emotion, I tell him a tale. The story of a brave little boy who travelled on an odyssey across turbulent seas and grew up to be a soldier for his new country.
The man the boy became was courageous and strong. People were in awe of his bravery, so much so that he won several medals. And after he finished in the army, he fell in love with a pretty lumberjack’s daughter and built himself a cabin in the woods so they could live there together.
Even with his new life in the forest, the man continued to be a hero to many. He scared away bears, built people houses with his bare hands, and fought to protect the wildlife that surrounded his home.
The man and his wife had one daughter who grew up to be a beautiful, kind, and loving doctor. She fell in love with a successful businessman who adored her and after several years, the man had a grandson who loved and idolized him as well. He lived happily ever after and died a legend, brave until his very last breath.
My grandfather is quiet for a while, and I think he’s fallen asleep before he slurs something that sounds a lot like, “I want to be just like him when I grow up, Pappa.” His speech is fading these days so it can be hard to decipher his words.
How I manage to hold it together, I have no idea. I lean over and kiss his forehead again before rolling out of bed and tucking him in for a second time. “You will be,” I tell him. “Sleep well, son.”
“Goodnight, Pappa,” he murmurs as I close the door behind him.
Stumbling to my room, I close the door behind me and stagger to the bed, where I just collapse into myself.
I shatter. I splinter. I break. I’m broken.
I sob and sob and sob until my lungs plead for air and my eyes for mercy. I sob until I don’t have a single ounce of energy left. Days and weeks and months and years of repressed emotion pour out of my eyes and into my pillow drenching it and drowning me. I sob into the unsympathetic silence.
When there are no tears left to shed, I force myself to think about anything other than the past two hours. I stare out into the blackness and bleakness through crimson eyes.
My mind replays the events of the day as if watching a silent movie. With all of the sadness and tears, I forgot I laughed today. That for half a second, I was carefree and able to act my age.
Today, for a few hours, I was Tristan, not someone who was fictional or dead. Someone saw me. The real me. The me I’m starting to lose with all of the characters I have to play.
And it felt incredible to be seen.
I try to hold onto that feeling with frantic desperation, but it eludes my grasp like the flash of light you see behind your eyelids as you close your eyes. I’m not sure when I’ll have the chance to experience it again.
My last thought as I fall into a restless slumber is of the ray of sunshine with golden hair and emerald eyes who, for a brief moment, seemed like my salvation.
CLOYING TENSION FLOWS in the air as I help my mom clear away the final remnants of the day in silence, suffocating me and slowing my movements.
My grandmother, who still wouldn’t talk to or look at me, retired to her guesthouse on the edge of the property not long after I finished tucking Oscar in for his bedtime. I don’t know if it was because she was born and raised in a frosty climate, but my grandmother is the queen of freezing people out. She’s a master at the Scandinavian ‘tough love’ approach to parenting and life.
She still lives in the quaint Californian fishing village of Morro Bay where my father had grown up. Making the voyage across the ocean in the sixties, after changing their surname to something more ‘American’ sounding, my grandparents had settled in the idyllic coastal town as they said it reminded them of their own childhoods in Norway. Every day they opened the windows and let in the fresh scents of seawater, ocean breeze, and nostalgia.
Though I’ve never been to Norway, summer visits to the bay mean I have my own childhood memories of whale watching and kayaking. Even after my dad had moved out and my paternal grandfather had died, my obstinate Farmor refused to move in with us until, in her words, she was ‘unfunctionably senile.’ I told her that wasn’t a word. Or a thing. In any language. Needless to say, that didn’t go down well.
It was temporary, but after years of persuading, she had come to stay with us to spend time with my dad during his last few months under the guise of ‘builders’ remodeling her property. My grandmother is many things; stubborn, strong, strict, and scary, but a good liar isn’t one of them.
Although he never said anything, I’m sure from the shrewd smile he gave her as she explained her predicament that Dad knew her true motivations for coming to stay. As her long-standing feud with the mailman attests to, my grandmother would never let anyone onto her property, let alone unsupervised.
He was amazing like that, my dad. Not only did he have a great sense of humor, but he humored people.
Even though at present she was emitting an aura of ice every time I was in the vicinity, I could do with my grandmother acting as a buffer between my mother and me right now. The unbearable silence is becoming awkward and everything is once again back in its proper place so I don’t even have anything to occupy my hands or distract my mind with.
I don’t want this gulf between us at all, or for it to become any wider than it already is. It’s not what my dad would have wanted. But still, I can’t help the sensation of precariously straddling two tectonic plates, which could shift at any moment, causing an earthquake of epic proportions.
I wonder if my mom feels the same. I also wonder if maybe we need that earthquake. If maybe one or both of us needs to go off the emotional Richter scale into unparalleled honesty. To speak our true thoughts and pray that not only will love survive the devastated aftershocks, but new life can grow in its wake.
Maybe there’s such a thing as being too still, too calm, too quiet, and too polite. Too much of too little. Too much of nothing. We are both saying everything except what we want to say. All the words and emotions my mother refuses to set free are bubbling just under the surface of her composure.
And if I’m being honest, the unbearable heat from my own thoughts and words unspoken is oppressive. Something has to give; otherwise, we will both erupt, scalding each other and ourselves in burns and ash.
Clearing my throat, I gather up the courage to break the silence. “Uh, Mom…”
But I don’t get any further than that, halted by her hand outstretched in the universal sign for ‘stop talking.’ Taken aback, my mouth pops closed as I eat air.
“Not right now, okay? I just…can’t right now.”
With that, she bends down to pick up her heels, which she had kicked off to clean the house, and makes her ascent up the left split staircase toward her bedroom without a backward glance.
I stare at the space where she stood for a minute or so, unsure of myself and of what to do. The house, once filled with light and laughter, has never been so dark and quiet. Now, the only sounds are my discordant breaths and the timely ticking
of the antique white grandfather clock in the corner of the room.
Deciding that the best thing is just to go to sleep and try to speed up the process of welcoming tomorrow. I turn off the light in the living room and hallway before making my way up the right staircase to my room.
As I make it through the other side of my sanctuary, I turn on the light and lean back against the door, taking a deep breath. Exhaling, my gaze travels around my safe place. I know most teenagers would say this, but I love my room. I am the most and best of myself within these four walls.
Much like myself, my bedroom has seen many evolutions over the years. From the hummingbirds and butterflies of my nursery, to the princess pink of my toddler years, to the purple paradise of my pre-teen years, to the short-lived gothic rebellion of fourteen-years-old, which we don’t speak of, every version of me is written on its walls.
I’m a firm believer that people leave behind their energy, long after they’ve left a place. It’s why some houses seem haunted while others appear to be the happiest of homes. Taking it all in, the thrum of the energy of all the Matildas past flow through me. This room has seen it all. Heartbreak and happiness, playtime and sleep time, princesses and puberty, sleepovers and secrets, dancing and days off from school. Its current evolution is its best yet, but I guess you always think that at the time.
Regardless of whether this is the best version of me, this room reflects whoever I am right now. The walls are white, like most of this house, but it’s saved from sterility by the splashes of color that flood every available surface. On the wall opposite my deliciously large four-poster bed is a huge and colorful flower, complete with petals and a long stem that starts at the bottom left hand corner of the wall. The flower is comprised of photographs. Some are family ones, others of my friends and childhood, or favorite places.
Photography is my favorite art form by far, and I hope to one day become a successful photographer, depending on how much time I have.
The Counting-Downers Page 6