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My Grandmother and Mike Roglia Joshua Trent Brown
My grandmother forgot who most of us were.
She forgot who her caretakers were, leading her to accuse a registered
nurse of stealing jewelry. She forgot who my mother was multiple times and left my mom in a sobbing panic afterwards.
She couldn’t remember how to cook her famous Crisco-fried chicken.
She couldn’t remember her battle with diabetes and the long walks that she used to take every day to lose weight. Some days she couldn’t remember my grandfather Horace was dead.
But she didn’t forget who I was. She hugged me the same way she always
did, possibly because she thought I was my uncle Frank—at 14, I looked just like him. She might have stared at me a little longer than usual, but she always liked to stare at me, even up to the day she died. She still saw me as a child, her baby, and just wanted to be around me. I was lucky, not having to see much of what had been taken from her.
My grandmother had Alzheimer’s Disease.
What we saw on the outside was a mix of blissful interactions with
so many new people around her and occasional discomfort and anger at her inability to remember. What was happening on the inside was a complex disease of proteins that form plaques and tangles in the brain.
Those plaques and tangles starve the brain cells and nervous system
pathways, killing them. When those brain connections go, so do memories and other functions.
Dr. Carol Colton, a professor of neurology at Duke University who
researches the brain’s immune system, explained that science’s understanding of the disease is imprecise. What prompts the onset of the disease and the formation of the proteins is still mostly unknown. Dr. Colton laments other scientists’ focus
