The Wayward Minds Collective

It’s been a rough couple of weeks. 

I realized something was wrong when I watched tv all weekend last weekend.

It was partially an issue of self-control, sure, but it was mainly I could not do anything else.

I would set all these plans for myself, but whenever I had the willpower to tear myself away from the screen, I would find myself merely watch something else.

I would stare at the wall, wide-eyed, for minutes at a time. Not blinking. Not thinking. A part of me was just turned off. Or elsewhere. And I didn’t know where I had gone.

Maybe it was nowhere. 

My brother has this phrase that he often likes to use when I get like this.

“You’re buffering like a YouTube video trying to load on bad Wi-Fi connection.”

I started doing passive activities while I would listen to tv– I got tired of doing nothing. 

Last Monday, I was drawing a scene of a town in Thailand that I had found on Google maps.

It was a neighborhood, sometime in the afternoon. There was laundry hanging from the fences, worn and weathered from years of constant use. The sleeves of the navy blue hoodie hanging from the fence were frayed, and the gray sweatpants next to them had a hole in the knee. 

On a different fence, there were three overturned buckets drying in the midday sun.

There was a little garden in front of the two houses made from crumbling brick, and the plants ran wild. Specks of green ran up the telephone pole, laughing at the brick’s failure to confine it.

It reminded me so much of life. There were no people, you could still feel their presence. The items that were left behind that gave brief glimpses of the lives they led. 

I was working on drawing the tile of the roof when my father walked in my room. He was fully dressed even though it was 11:30 at night.

“Grandpa just died. I’m going to the apartment now.”

He had had a stroke over the weekend, and had fallen into a coma shortly afterwards.

They knew the end was coming when he couldn’t speak anymore– he had always been a talker. 

“Are Aunt Sylvie and Uncle Tom there?”

“Yeah, they’re already there.”

I looked at my drawing again.

Life in stillness, even without the people being there physically. 

“How are you holding up?” I asked. 

He shrugged. “I’m alright. I really do think that he’s in a better place now. You didn’t see him much after Grandma’s funeral, so you missed how quickly he was declining. He was suffering, honestly.”

I might not have seen as much of the decline as he did, but I had a decent enough picture of it.

 He had been a college professor for over 40 years, so he liked to talk, a lot. Mainly about how he had been a college professor for over 40 years, and how he had helped over 14,000 students. 

Grandma’s Last Birthday

He made sure we knew that number while he gave my grandma’s last birthday speech. Everyone was uncomfortable how he had turned what we had all accepted to be her last birthday celebration into a self-aggrandizing walk down memory lane, but no one stopped him.

They let him talk for 20 minutes about it during his speech to her, because he was old and didn’t know any better. When he was done, he looked frantically for a USB drive he put together that had a bunch of picture of grandma when she was younger.

“I just want you all to see what she looked like back in the day– she was such a catch!”

We chuckled politely, mildly uncomfortable at his eagerness.

“I even managed to find a picture of her at the beach in her bathing suit.” 

My grandmother sat in her wheelchair as she watched her husband grow more and more upset.

Her once blue eyes were a vacant gray now. She couldn’t talk, or remember the names of anyone who was talking to her.

But she still smiled. Just not in their direction. 

My uncle told a story about getting beaten up at school  as a child and being too afraid to tell his mom.

She figured it out anyways from his dirty clothes and the occasional blood she saw, despite my uncle making his best attempts to hide them. She made him change to a school that they couldn’t quite afford, and was a little further away from where they lived, but he was happier there. And she wanted the best for him. 

“Mothers have a knowing about their children, and they will gladly sacrifice everything they have for them. So thank you, Mom, for doing that for me.”

Everyone in the room wiped a silent tear from their eye. My grandfather still searched for the USB drive. My grandmother was still, and tears rolled down her cheeks.

“And as he get older, you feel more prickly.”

My grandmother listened more than she talked, and was more often seen with a smile than without one. Even before she had Alzheimer’s. People liked that about her. 

But even as a child I felt like she was hidden behind the vast shadow that was my grandfather. I didn’t get a chance to talk to her much because he always wanted to talk to me.

And he was a talker. He always described himself as a talker. He was proud of it, too. 

A New Stranger

He was really hard of hearing, and it was difficult for him to hear what the other person would say so eventually he gave up trying to listen. He made up for it by talking for both of them. 

It was really more of lecture about himself than a conversation. 

I would spend 30 minutes on the couch, nodding politely and smiling at him during the annual Christmas get-together, uncomfortable by how close he would sit with his arm around me.

Uncomfortable by the strangely sweet and stale smell of his breath that older people seem to always have. 

I was born in 2001.

In 2002, he fell from a ladder and hit his head.

He was in a coma for a couple of weeks. Everyone says that he was never the same. 

He couldn’t pick up on social cues anymore. Like when someone isn’t interested in what you’re saying, or when someone is trying to politely get out of a conversation, or even if someone is getting angry with you for talking so much. 

Or if your wife has something to say, and letting her say it. 

He had essentially regressed to that of a small child. Eagerly needing someone, anyone to be impressed by his accomplishments, and needing to prove to himself that he could still help people. Even if people didn’t want his help, or nothing at all to do with him.

As I got older, I understood that I wouldn’t have much time with him. Especially after the seven years that they had disowned my father, and didn’t talk to any of us. After the pastor said they were allowed to talk to us again, we had moved to a different state.

They didn’t know us, and we didn’t know them. 

But they tried. And as I got older I tried, too. 

However, there’s really something to be said about the phrase “too little, too late.” 

It’s harder to come to love someone who holds you verbally hostage. You don’t want to be rude, and you know they’re not going to be around forever, but something about this person makes you feel… weird.

Uncomfortable.

Prickly. 

And you try to ignore it, you really do. You know that this isn’t really him, it’s just the brain damage because that’s what everyone tells you. They wish you had met him before his accident– he was so nice before, and he helped a lot of people. He was a good listener, they tell you.

You remind yourself of that, repeating it in your head like mantra as he puts his arm on your shoulder, and you try not to cringe at his touch because that would be rude. He hasn’t seen you in years, and he keeps telling you how beautiful you look and you smile politely, but still look around the room for an escape from the conversation. 

And you don’t tell anyone how you feel. Because that’s just how he is with everyone now, right? You’re just being weird.

But you get more and more uncomfortable a the family gatherings because as he gets older, you feel more prickly. 

Grandma’s Wake

And then at your grandmother’s wake, he sees you.

He’s happy to see you, and he casually puts an arm around you like he knows you well, and you feel prickly again. He tells people proudly that you’re an art teacher now, and that it should be easy for you to teach art because you are a work of art and he laughs.

And you laugh along politely, but a part of you freezes as a sudden realization hits you.

That sounds like a line.

And you grow a little cold. He turns to you then, puts his arms on your shoulders and gets a little too close as he says, “You’re a very beautiful young woman. Be careful.” He leans in too close and you smell his breath again. You see his teeth– he has two silver crowns.

He makes sure he’s by you for the next 20 minutes, and he does it again and again. He has dementia and couldn’t remember saying that to you two minutes ago.

And you realize with a certainty that you’ve never had before that you are uncomfortable with this man. It’s not the conversations that he holds you to, that he holds everyone to, but uncomfortable as a woman is with a man that is attracted to her. 

And you feel weird because you think it’s in your head.

At your grandmother’s repass, there are a lot of people. You’re still wary because your grandfather is there, but there are lots of other people for him to talk to. You find the cousins closest to your age, and you begin to relax. You laugh, talk a little smack, and your brother rolls his eyes playfully at you.

You feel an arm appear around your waist, and you begin to feel cold. And prickly.

As he talks to you, it’s harder to form that polite smile you’ve always had as your cousins begin to melt away from you and him. Your cloud of safety disperses as he repeats the same jokes one after the other and you feel your body getting rigid from his touch.

“It’s harder to form that polite smile you’ve always had…”

Someone calls him away from you, and you run to the bathroom. You’re sweating, and can’t catch your breath. You look down at your hands and realize they’re trembling. 

Your Aunt walks in with her daughter.

She’s four now, so she can use the bathroom fine, but she still likes Mommy to be nearby, just not in the stall with her.

“She’s getting more wary of people being around her when she uses the bathroom now,” your Aunt explains. “I think she’s becoming more self-conscious of herself.”

You stare at the floor, wondering if you should tell her. 

“Hey, Aunt Sylvie, I don’t really feel… comfortable with Grandpa.” 

She sighs, and her body sags a little as she leans against the wall. You’ve never noticed how delicate she looks in her grief.

Guilt and shame spread from your gut like a warm liquor traveling backwards. This wasn’t her burden to bear.

“Your Uncle Gary took him to the doctor a couple of weeks ago. The doctor told him that he was talking about one of his granddaughters being a ‘gorgeous knock out’. He warned us that he may start acting more inappropriately as he progresses further. We thought he was talking about Georgia, and was going to supervise him when he was with her.”

Georgia is your twelve year old cousin who is deep in the throes of puberty. She reminds you of yourself at that age when you look at her. 

“But I guess now we know who he was talking about. Thanks for telling me. I’ll keep a lookout.”

And you hug. But you feel a strange twist of remorse and anger. Why did everyone know of this warning except you? Why didn’t they tell you?

As you think more and more about it, the angrier you get because that was what your gut was telling you, but you were ignoring it because everyone else was acting like it was normal.

You gaslit yourself. 

Because that’s not him. Even though that’s the only man you’ve ever met, that’s not really him.

You’re angry, but you don’t talk about it with your Aunt. You avoid family gatherings more.

No one asks any questions on why you ask if he’ll be there before you say whether or not you’re going. Part of you feels that they know, but just don’t want to admit that they know and didn’t do anything about it.

That they kept you in the dark. 

In His Apartment

So you know that he was declining. It was a dark and twisted movie that you couldn’t be part of anymore.

That’s you.

Me? I’m the movie critic who’s able to understand the meaning of the film.

An observer of him and of you.

I went to his apartment yesterday, and I looked through the old photo albums that he kept.

You would always be mad at him for taking so many photos growing up– you hated pictures being taken of you. I’m glad he did. I get to see you grow up over the years. We look so different. In the photos where you look the happiest and most beautiful were the ones where I know you were the most miserable.

I know because I was there, too. 

As I stand in his apartment, I’m reminded of the scene of the neighborhood in Thailand. 

Even though he’s not there anymore, I still feel his life force present with me. Through the things he left behind. 

He has shelves and shelves of old VHS movies that he’s told you about. There’s a Harrison Ford documentary tape called “The Reluctant Hero”, you wonder if that’s how he viewed himself. If that’s why he was such a big fan of Harrison Ford.

An entire bookshelf is brown with encyclopedia books on sociology, and you’re reminded of a bad joke he told you years ago.

“Everyone texts nowadays! We had that, too, when I was growing up, you know. Textbooks!” You remember how hard he’d laugh at his own jokes. 

I smile at the memory.

In his room there’s a stripped twin bed with blankets and sheets thrown over it.

On the wall there’s a greasy hand print where he had leaned against it to get dressed. There’s a smear from where it had moved and he wiggled on his pants.

You remember your father telling you how he would always be dressed, and how he slept in his clothes instead of changing. That he would carry around a briefcase even though he’s been retired for decades now.

I lightly trace the handprints with my finger, noticing how the light reflects the oils on the wall.

I walk into his closest and see suits that you’ve never seen him wear. There are a number of tiny suits hanging on the hangers. I get confused for a second. Did he dress a baby at some point?

You remember that he was a ventriloquist, and had his puppet wear many suits during their performances. He named him Harold. You wonder if he’s laying in one of these cases on the floor.

I sit on the floor and look through their wedding pictures. You almost don’t recognize them because they look so young. So happy with themselves and with life. Your Grandma smiles and he beams with his arm around her waist. He has a tan bucket hat hanging from around his neck while he wears a plaid navy shirt. His clip on sunglasses are flipped up, exposing his thick glasses underneath.

This is how he looks in most of your memories. He loved being outside.

I love being outdoors, too. I must get it from him. 

I find a letter that someone wrote to my grandmother:

“Thank you for welcoming us into your home!” they wrote. “You have such a lovely kitchen. You are so talented with teaching the kiddos the piano! They’re so well-trained. I’m leaving the little ones to you, though! Haha.”

I look at the signature. Carol something wrote it. My grandfather kept it for her, and had it in an album. He was proud of her– her accomplishments were his, too.

My dad pops his head in the closet. 

“Why are you sitting on the floor?”

“Oh, I’m just looking at their wedding pictures.”

“Will you put that on the table when you’re done? Sylvie might want them. He has so much stuff, and we need to start getting rid of it– but I don’t know who will want what…” He pauses for a moment. “Hey, do you want his record player? He has two, but there’s a smaller one over there.” 

He points to a record player by the window. It’s not small at all–- its about the size of a medium shipping box. 

“No, I’m okay, that’s still pretty big.”

“I actually have an even smaller record player at home if you want it,” he suggests. 

“Maybe, does he have any records?”

“Yeah, but they’re mainly classical. You can get records at a lot of store now, though. They’re coming back.”

You follow him to the living room, and you notice the carpet that you’ve sat on so many times as a child with your grandmother. It’s a blue oval with different musical notes on it, all of them labeled.

Quarter note. Half note. Rest.

“I’m the movie critic who’s able to see the meaning behind the film.”

I sit on the couch that he had in his house. The same couch where he would make you feel prickly, and I feel comfort knowing that it’s still here. That I can still sit in it. That it’s still with us. 

You realize that you never hated him. You never thought to. You realize that that’s just the person that he became, but not who he really was. 

He was a man who loved his wife. He was a man who liked to help people. He was a man who liked books and movies. He was an educator and counselor through and through.

He just forgot how to do it after a while.

Even though you never saw that, while he was alive, I can see it now through your eyes. And through his stillness.

Through the stillness in the life he left behind. 

You love him, but you don’t miss him. You have no regrets. 

I am proud of the person you’ve become.

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