Fun concepts to explain.

[rivka]

Alex: peeling a stamp off my stamp book, which I carelessly left on my desk. I need an envelope.

Me: Hey! Stamps cost money, so you can't use them without permission. takes it back.

Alex: But I need a stamp. I need an envelope that we're not using, and some stamps.

Me: Why do you need them?

Alex: Because I need to send a letter to my great-grandmother.

Me: Who is your great-grandmother?

Alex: She died.

Me: Honey, you can't send a letter to someone who died.

Alex: Why not?

Me: Because when someone dies, we don't know where they are and no one can see them or be with them anymore. That's why it's so sad when someone dies.

Alex: Oh.

I feel like I bungled that one, inadvertently giving the impression that death is like being swept away to one of the CIA's secret prisons. It would help if she gave me advance warning that I was going to need to come up with a sensitive explanation of life's great mysteries.

Comments

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

She actually has one surviving great-grandmother... well, at least physically surviving.

My paternal grandmother has Alzheimer's, and has been losing her mental faculties for quite a while now. She was able to come to our wedding nine years ago, although she was pretty confused about just where we were having the wedding and who these people were that she hadn't known for years and years. Still, she seemed to enjoy it, and it meant a lot to me for her to be there.

She's still in decent physical condition, given that she's 96 years old. She exercises on a regular basis, so I'm told, and she doesn't have major problems with her health. However, she no longer remembers who I am, and she even has periods when she forgets who her son (my father) is. She does her best to be polite when I call to speak with her (she's living with my uncle and aunt, her other son), but it's very clear that she doesn't have any idea who I am.

Needless to say, I don't call her very much any more.

I wish Alex would get a chance to know the wonderful lady that I knew as I grew up. I'd like for her to work with Alex on her times-tables like she did with me, and to tell her about what it was like to live on a farm in Arkansas in the first part of the 20th century. That's gone into the mists of time now, though.

I sure do miss my grandmother.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Even after Mom's memory was more or less useless, it was still possible to find out things if they were approached in an oblique fashion. Asking her an outright question was right out -- the one thing she knew was that she couldn't remember anything. A quick aside, as if confirming a detail, could sometime elicit forgotten memories.

She seemed happiest near the end -- well, not right at the end, when she was just asleep all the time, but some months before she died, she seemed good-natured and content, finally free of the resentful feelings that were about the last thing to leave her.