My parents always used to say that I had my grandmother stubbornness. Despite being a

spare-like woman barely above five feet tall, her presence eclipsed everyone else in

whatever room she walked into. Hardened by the transient memories of a dustball era childhood,

she worked to put each of her five children through college. My father included. There

seemed to be no force that she couldn't overcome. Death included.

At age finally caught up to her. It started with some minor incidents, such as forgetting

the day or names, which we chalked up to exhausting herself. It was only when we found her,

crouched, sobbing in the garden, and three in the morning, snapped twigs and tangled

her hair and clutching at nothing in her arms.

Save him, she screamed. Her unraveling quickened with each passing day, and her once-raiser

sharp brain was blunted by neurodegeneration. She started to lose any semblance of a

current reality, fogged over by childhood memories from a world long past. Her own children

became strangers to her, whose hands she would slap away when they tried to help her.

She would stumble about searching for a long departed family, her cries growing more

frantic before she would crumble into a sobbing heap with a knees drawn up to a chin, like

a lost child.

My parents became her carers, changing her urine soak sheets and assuring her confused

babbling in strained, low voices. Even in the haze, there was still a flicker of a

former self, and ever my mother would give her a glass of water, she would snatch it in

her own trembling hands and drink it, droplet soaking through the barricose vein grain-fall

to her neck. Being only a child back then, and lacking the adult foresight I have now,

I became increasingly terrified of her. Even when my parents had sat me down and tried

...