One year later

The Fourth of July is less than a week away, and while this is a special holiday for Americans, for me, it is laced with a bittersweet feeling of loss and remembrance of a different kind.  This year’s Fourth will mark one year since I lost my physical grandfather to Alzheimer’s, although he really died at some undefined time before that.  I usually write my posts about things in a whimsical sort of tone, but real life is not always so sunny, and this particular event is something I am thinking a lot about lately.  Most of you that read this may have even known my grandpa, and others may have only heard about him, but I want to tell you who he was to me.

Mahlon “Bill” Adams grew up on a farm in Ada, Kansas, one of four boys.  In an ironic twist, he himself had no sons and four daughters (although he was always considered his girls’ spouses his own sons).  Then from those four girls came all grandsons and one granddaughter – me.  Because of these gender lines in our family and the age spread of my cousins, I always had a very special relationship with my grandfather.  He was forever my Papa, and I, his Little Cottontail.  If there was ever a man that could be summed in one word, that was Papa, and that word was jokester.  When he laughed, he laughed with his whole body, shoulders hunched over and shaking up and down.  Further to that, Papa was the funniest person he knew, which made him all the easier to love. 





Papa and me circa 2000

 
As a child, I had a beloved blankie that he was always trying to steal from me just to get a rise out of me.  The game became that if I was touching Bear (my grandma), I was on “safe base” and he had to let go of my blankie.  At one point around age 8 or so, I got so fed up with his shenanigans that I took out a pair of scissors and cut a very small square out of my blankie and said, “HERE!!  Now you have your own and can leave me alone!”  He immediately chuckled and pulled out his wallet and slid the square into it.  He carried that swatch around in his wallet for more than 15 years, tucked right next to a picture of me.  I’ve been told that he often pulled it out and repeated this story to his buddies at his coffee group.  Unfortunately, that piece of blankie got lost at the end of his life, when he was repeatedly pulling things in and out of his wallet as a way to make sure things were all in order.  That’s not the end of that story, but I will get to that...


Papa was a cabinet builder and from an early age on the farm he was building his own toys.  As a little girl, Papa built me my very own dollhouse with customized wooden furniture, a pink painted broomstick horse that he teasingly named Plug, a small wooden step-stool, and a baby doll bed.  Bear always jokes that when he built the doll bed, she warned him, “You know she is just going to climb right in that.”  He replied, “Oh no she won’t!  She knows she’s too big for this.”  Guess who won that bet?  Hey, I was only 2 ½ - in my eyes it looked like it was my size!


Papa taught me how to give a Wet Willie, how to peel an apple, how to fry bacon on a campfire, and how to snore quite properly.  He also unfortunately taught me the cruelty that life sometimes hands.  When I was in middle school, Papa was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  I remember the heavy weight of fear and sadness that set into my chest when my mom first told me he had cancer.  In my mind, that immediately meant death, and I felt physically incapacitated thinking of it, until my mom assured me that it should be treatable.  Luckily it was very treatable and he never had any other cancer scares after the initial treatment.  It was a handful of years later when he was diagnosed with dementia and finally Alzheimer’s.  If I’m being honest, I don’t remember those days.  I was in high school and college when the symptoms starting showing up, and I was probably just too consumed in my own problems to really allow myself to grasp the reality of the situation.  When I graduated college in 2006 though, that was when I started to tune in to what was going on with him.


I still saw Papa at most holidays, but in between that, I didn’t have regular communication with him, so I think I tended to brush off the things my mom was saying about his decline – him not being able to button his shirts anymore, his more frequent naps, his coming in and out of conversations, his stumbles when he was walking.  When I closed my eyes, all I wanted to see was that goofy man with the pot belly, plaid shirt, and trucker hat.  If I started acknowledging these things as a sign of anything, it made it all real, and that was not a reality I was prepared to face.  It became even easier for my denial to grow when I moved to New York in 2007.  I then saw him even less than before and was less conscience of his digression.  For a long time I believe he tried to hide what was going on with himself.  He was ashamed.  To me, I think this must have been the worst time for him, being somewhere in between awake and asleep, knowing that everyday he was going to lose a little more of himself.


In the last year of his life, my mom and my Aunt Shellie were visiting him nearly every weekend, in order to give some relief to my grandmother.  Whenever my mom would tell me how the weekend went, I would cry because the man she was describing was not the same man I had held close to my heart for 25 years.  At one point my mom insisted that I plan a trip to come home to see him.  I knew that it was a goodbye visit, but I would not allow myself to admit it.  That was April of 2009 and that was the last time I saw him.  At some point shortly after that trip, I had to ask my mom to stop updating me on his illness.  It was too hard for me to think about, especially when I couldn’t just get in the car and drive three hours and be sitting next to him, holding his hand, and every picture I saw of him, he seemed to age 5 more years.  His face had started to droop, he was losing weight, and that toothy grin was barely there anymore.


The week of Christmas that year, my mom called and told me it was time to put Papa in a care facility.  Those all-too familiar feelings of fear and sadness took me over again.  I had thought I would get to see him one last time, but it was too late.  He was too far gone at that point.  There was such a strange silence that year at Christmas.  It wasn’t full of its usual joy.


In June of 2010, I knew the end was near for him.  He no longer recognized any of his daughters or my grandmother, and he would not eat or drink.  I am glad that I never saw him in that state.  It makes it easier for me to preserve the positive memories of him in my mind, but there is also a part of me that wonders if he would have mistaken me for my grandmother as young woman, as I look so much like her.  And would that have made his world better for just a few moments?  I don’t know at what point this changed, but Bear always tells me that even once he was moved into the care facility, a smile would come onto his face with mention of my name.

Papa and Bear

On the morning of the 4^th, my phone rang and I saw it was my dad calling.  The ever-presiding head of the family, I have not seen my father cry but two times in my life.  But there he was, on the other end of the line, barely able to speak.  All he could muster out was, “Papa’s gone.”


As much as I had tried to prepare myself for that moment and knew that it was on the horizon, I was in total shock at that moment.  I suddenly found myself unable to support the weight of my own body and fell onto my bed, weeping for what felt like a physical pain in my body.  I could not breathe.  I could not speak.  I wanted it all not to be real.  This pain would surely be over and everything would be back to normal, right?  But that’s the thing about death…there is no going back, no do-overs.  The only thing that gave me the littlest bit of comfort was knowing that the body that had taken my Papa hostage could no longer turn him into someone he was not.

One positive thing about having a fatal disease is that it allowed our family to prepare a funeral that rang through Bill Adams in every aspect.  I won’t go into all the details of that, but the one thing that will always stick out in my mind was how clear the sky was that day.  For some reason, it made me feel at peace.  I felt like I was looking at a landscape that could only be created in movies and paintings, and I knew it was just the way he would have wanted it.



The sky and the view at Papa's funeral.  Amazing photo is courtesy of Sam.



One year later I’m still fighting his loss on a daily basis.  He is in my dreams almost every night and so I never want to leave them.  I’ve started volunteering in the New York City chapter of the Alzheimer’s Association in order to help deal with my grief.  I am not the only one with this story, and it helps to surround myself with young people who can relate.  Every time I do something for the organization, I hope that Papa is looking down on me with pride.

A few weeks ago I was home in Kansas City, and I was sitting out on the back deck of my parents’ house talking with my sister-in-law, Kimi and Bear.  I was telling Kimi how Bear had given me her wedding earrings when I graduated from high school, to wear at my own wedding one day.  She asked me to describe them and I realized that they were upstairs in the storage closet, so I went to look for them.  I found the box where I knew the earrings were and with them was a card that I had not recalled ever having received.  Inside was a note that Papa had written to me and half of the swatch of my blankie I had given him all those years ago.  In the note he told of how he would always carry the other half with him and be reminded of me and that when I looked at my half, I would know how much he loved me.  I had never felt his love more…