On One Sided Conversations

When I talk to my grandmother, I often find myself filling in the gaps of a conversation long past. She asks questions and carries on a topic like any other person would, but she also interrupts me sometimes when I try to respond, laughs at random intervals, or keeps nodding along and making small comments long after I’ve finished speaking and the room has faded into complete silence. I fill in the gaps of a different person each time; first it’s Orville, then Susan, then Dolly. Sometimes, she’ll address me directly. If not, I play a guessing game of my own in the silences.

Does it sound like she’s talking to a sibling or a friend? Someone older or someone younger? It’s fascinating in its own way to hear these bits and pieces of other people who I’ve always heard stories of but never known. It’s amazing how much I can learn just from her reactions to what they say. My grandmother’s older brother tends to cut her off in the middle of her sentences, as does her late husband. The difference between them is that she laughs when interrupted by her husband but gets annoyed when it’s her brother. When she’s more lucid, I ask questions about them, trying to figure out what type of person they were before they died: trying to figure out what it might’ve been like to be on the other side of the conversation.

In that way, all my questions and answers come from the same place. I’ll never really know what I’m missing from these people in her past. People that must have been so important to her, way back when, to put up with those interrupted conversations. To come back into her mind even once they’ve been dead and gone for longer than I’ve been alive. They say Alzheimers turns your mind into static. They still manage to break through that gray, like the first spark of fireworks on the fourth of July: like something beautiful nestled in smoldering ashes. It never lasts, but for just a moment, I know she is happy.

It’s a horrible thing to lose your mind like that. Her body is decaying even faster, and she probably won’t be here nearly as long as I wish she would be. Sometimes, when I think about that fact late at night—so tired that my ceiling starts spinning in circles yet I still can’t bring myself to sleep—I wonder back to the conversations we have. It brings me comfort, to think that in my own final years, when I start to waste away, I might get to talk to her again in my own one-sided conversations.