The Time Traveler

Katherine Kiser

Tuesday nights used to be special because my grandmother would call. She has always been impressively ritualistic and mechanical with regard to schedule, but even though her calls lacked spontaneity, I never felt like an obligation or some task delineated and crossed off in her day planner. We talked mostly about me. Without prying too much, she invited me into her confidence, and I spoke openly about my marriage, my friendships, my plans. She seldom offered a sharp opinion on any matter—I can think of only one time she ever told me no—but by measuring the way she said “mmm hmmm” or “I see” I received valuable, irreplaceable counsel. Even when I grumbled about her timing or my own busyness, these chats offered support, perhaps on some subliminal level, that I would only miss in their absence.

My mother and I began plotting against her the year she battled breast cancer for the second time, although this physical illness was not the source of our concern. We didn’t doubt that her friends from up north understood the severity of her forgetfulness and would see to it that she safely traveled to and from radiation treatments at the university hospital. We knew she was cared for, but we also knew that she knew there was a problem. She had always been a marvelous pretender when it came to denial of a hard truth. But for the time, we felt she was safe.

The day Mom took her to tour the retirement apartments at Southern Meadows Estates, they had lunch at Steak-n-Shake. There, over bowls of chili, Mom excitedly talked about all the activities—quilting parties, daily devotionals, monthly bus tours—that the place offered. My grandmother said that it was lovely that they had such places for people who were old and need- ed care. But she was not old. She did not need that care. I am not sure what finally caused her opinion to change on this matter—perhaps a secret fall, a second call from a collection agency, or a missed doctor’s appointment—but less than a year later she resolved to move to Southern Meadows. It was my constant prayer that she was never afraid.

The emergence of summer has always been a welcome time for me. I crave sunshine, warmth, and long days spent outdoors. The pace of life slackens, and my unspoken anxieties subside. Relationships feel their full depth the way a sidewalk holds on to the day’s sun hours after nightfall and how that warmth feels on bare feet when you step up to the fence to talk with the neighbor who walks his dog and smokes cigars where his wife won’t see.

The beginning of my grandmother’s only summer at Southern Meadows came on the heels of a rough winter. She lived among the boxes of sentimental ornaments and non-priceless antiques and old clothing. I would sneak what I considered non-essentials to the dumpster out back. I wanted organization. She wanted home. We never would strike a balance there. Waves of guilt singed my heart. I felt like a thief.

The boys and I made excuses to stop by her apartment almost every day that summer. Often, we would take her to the park so she could watch them play. These were the good days. We shared our life with her, and she was overjoyed. We had picnics. We went on short walks and small shopping trips. We made homemade ice cream and excuses for her forgetfulness. We stowed leftovers with reheating instructions in her fridge. Mom began paying all her bills and gathering paperwork to attain legal guardianship.

About the time the last of my grandmother’s moving boxes were finally unpacked, the remainder of ash-blonde dye was trimmed from the ends of her hair. She was beautiful and natural and seemed, for the first time, elderly. Sparkling blue eyes, startling white hair. Radiant. She seldom wore makeup now and did not need it. Other things about her appearance were frightening, though, like her refusal to wear anything but a particular light denim pants suit or the whole days she would spend in pajamas. She stopped showering. For twenty years after her official retirement as a studio piano instructor, she had worked in an upscale ladies’ dress shop. Without speaking, her appearance had always silently argued that it was a woman’s job to be certain she was presentable.

When my cell phone rang during an early morning staff meeting on my first day back to school that August, I was overwhelmed with dread at the sight of her name on the caller ID.

“I thought you would be here,” my grandmother gasped on the other end of the line. “No, but I am on my way.”

“Ok. Please do that.”

I left without initialing the sign-out sheet.

When I arrived she was all stoicism and apologies. She was fine. She had a bad dream was all. Everything was fine, but the summer was over. The next week, my mother was sick—again—but she continued to care for my grandmother, a job that increased in intensity and demand as they both neglected their own personal care. Exhausted, Mom called me one evening.

“Your grandmother was completely herself tonight. She finally ate a real meal, the spinach ravioli from Alfonso’s she loves so much, and we shared a bottle of Zinfandel. We giggled as I helped her shower and we both fell in the bathroom. I don’t know when she had last showered. But we talked some. We really talked.”

My throat tightened.

Then she asked me, “Will you please take her to the blood lab at Memorial tomorrow? The appointment is right after school. I just need some rest.”

My grandmother did not answer when I called to her as I let myself in the front door.

When I found her in bed still wearing last night’s pajamas and acknowledging my presence only in unintelligible mumbles, I lay beside her, whispered a prayer, and called 911. Her hair smelled like fresh shampoo. In a way, I was grateful that she was finally sick enough that the hidden problem would be taken seriously and that my own selfish caregiver guilt could finally be somewhat alleviated. Round-the-clock supervision was no longer optional. Without grudge or complaint, she moved into an assisted living facility.

One evening last week, I glanced at the wall clock the moment I noticed that the last of the day’s light was no longer visible out the western kitchen window. 6:24 and completely dark. I cannot believe it is happening already. I am not prepared to face the harsh reality of winter. The autumn sunshine has always reminded me of my grandmother’s 1970s photographs, all orange and glowing and obscured by age. Comfortable, inviting. The warm, creamy bokeh of the Chicago cityscape behind their smiles summons me to their world, but the slightest hint of the chill of winter makes me shudder, and I draw back. I don’t belong there.

There are a few small Nordstrom boxes of photographs remaining in my basement, and I cannot bear to throw them out like the old curios I discarded in her unpacking. None of the pictures were taken after 1992, the year my grandfather died. When I was first going through their contents the summer my grandmother lived at Southern Meadows, I was filled with questions and hoped to find answers. I was excited to finally know a few real facts about the people I came from.

But now, I no longer ask questions when I see a black and white photograph of a half-dozen Indian women in Saris in the living room of their split-level on National Drive in the West Chicago suburbs. I do not look at the picture of the man — garment tucked into belt — holding a goat across his shoulders and muse that my grandparents must have gone to the Holy Land. I do not wonder if their Downers Grove neighbors complained while my grandfather soloed on trumpet accompanied by accordion, bass, and piano in their den where cigarette smoke hung about the end-table lamp and my grandmother smiled wryly from the sofa. I see their Carpenter’s Christmas Portrait record and picture their holidays with canned-ham dinners and tinsel on the tree. I do not contemplate their happiness, but I am not welcome to explore their fabricated Bloomsbury.

My mother was a deeply private person, and I seldom asked about her upbringing before her heart attack. When I did, she never volunteered much more than a caption for these snapshots anyway. Their lives are lost in history now and cannot be a source of longing for me.

When I woke up this morning, it was raining. Walking outside to the garage, I was all at once engulfed in a feeling of tired heaviness that was neither worry nor sadness. It subsided only slightly as I drove to work. The business of adjusting the windshield wipers to best negotiate the ever-changing cadence of raindrops distracted and disarranged my thoughts. Autopilot set in, but intermittent fragments of my grandmother’s pronouncement infiltrated the welcome white noise that hung in my ears.

“I sure am glad my house finally sold. It was time.”

The words themselves were innocent, yet unsettling because for the first time since we had accepted her dementia, I could not pinpoint their logical origin.

The stately but crumbling 1870s Italianate where my husband and I are raising our sons is situated on the busiest intersection in our Southeastern Illinois county. Its enormous white columned porch and picket fence make it stand out against a backdrop of banks and gas stations as a relic that has somehow managed to outlast its peers. Now, it shows its age. One day, it will be lovely again. It is a beautiful old home. Yesterday, as we drove to Sunday lunch, my grandmother stared at it out her window at it as we drove past.

“I remember when I used to live there,” she whimsically recalled.             

“You never lived there. That one is my house,” I blurt out angrily.

My husband silently stares at the road ahead and reads the hurt on my face in his periphery. I know that the words are ugly and over-harsh, and immediately I retreat. I will never know if she was harmed by my calloused words or not. Instead, she pretends she was talking about anything else, and the conversation was gone.

She is a time traveler now, who has somehow become detached in a previous life that at some point branched into other created times. She exists contentedly in a real present. She does not doubt or deny actual realities as they present themselves, but there is no logic to what she does and does not internalize when she creates her understood reality. She has not killed off or destroyed memories of her past, nor has she entirely reinvented them. Some people argue this is the paradox that does not allow the possibility of actual time travel: we simply aren’t able to define a present while holding two versions of a past.

Lots of folks move closer to family when they get older, I tell myself. It is what’s best, I rationalize. But I still feel a twinge of guilt when I take her back to her assisted living facility each Sunday after we have lunch at the Mexican restaurant. My eyes involuntarily pry intorooms as we walk through the halls of her wing. She can’t possibly be like them. They scream out for people who are not there. They live in a constant state of time traveling completely de- void of elements of our present world. They lie in bed, yet are strong enough to get up. They die there. Without family. Without hope. Helplessly alone with their hired caregivers.

But when I look at my grandmother, I know that she knows that Jesus loves her. Her heart is never troubled nor afraid, even when she falls asleep watching the news and wakes thinking an outbreak of Ebola is spreading through her facility. She cannot remember whether or not she has eaten lunch or used the restroom when I pick her up to go out for coffee, but tears stream down her face when her confident soprano warbles “Abide with Me” during two o’clock devotions in the community room.

And I know that she knows that she loves me, even though we do not exist in the same world. On the rare occasions she realizes she has time traveled, she gauges my reflection to insure no harm has been caused to me. She is ever gracious. Truly selfless. These things are my comfort. They are how I cope with the fact that she doesn’t call me anymore on Tuesdays because she doesn’t remember if it is Wednesday or Saturday and because she has forgotten how to use the phone on her nightstand.

It is my constant prayer that I will never be afraid.