Interviewing My Grandfather

My grandfather circled the room and asked the question again. Where’s Barb? ​

He wasn’t agitated, nor worried. He just wanted to know where his wife of nearly seven decades was. Why wasn't she at home?

That exchange happened on a loop. Every half hour restarting his inquiry. Each time I answered, a sense of ease would appear over his face, momentarily mollified. It was nice to see how the news calmed him.

Barb, my grandmother, was in the hospital recovering from routine knee surgery, and a few of us who lived nearby rotated grandfather-sitting duty. Just like with a child, danger is found in the mundane.

I’m not sure when he got Alzheimer’s. The disease is notoriously hard to detect, occurring gradually and then suddenly, forever altering the final chapter of life. 

My grandfather lived a long and happy life. He passed away in 2019, at the age of 94, still in strong physical shape and with many of his loved ones close by. The last several years it was his mind and memory that atrophied. 

Sometimes it’s hard to admit, but as his memory vanished so did ours of him. Most of us can see our own through-line from past to present. We see it in others and their stories too. Our admiration for another becomes an accumulation of all these moments across time. 

But how do we rehabilitate the memory of a loved one who has morphed before our eyes?

Fortunately, my grandfather’s stories remain alive through the memories of the people he loved and who loved him. Barb, of course. His four sons, their wives, and his eight grandchildren. We each have unique stories to cherish and tell. 

But at some point we lose the opportunity to hear those stories from their source. 

I was lucky. Maybe it was dumb luck, but in college I interviewed my grandfather about his experience as an 18-year old in the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s final failed surge across the Ardennes Forest.

That one conversation turned into several over the span of a few weeks. Each time, he’d show up with a legal pad full of scribbled notes. (I like to picture him jotting down story details the night before.) We sat at a long mahogany table, I pressed play on the cassette player and he’d get lost telling stories until the tape rolled to a stop. 

I saw how the disease changed him. Same corny sense of humor and affable demeanor, but those stories we recorded were no longer within reach. Basic conversations became difficult and then nearly impossible to sustain. Reckoning with and becoming accustomed to a new version of him made it increasingly difficult to remember the person I grew up knowing. The person who possessed all of those stories.

After my grandmother left the hospital, and we returned to our lives, I reached for those recordings. Listening to those tapes rehabilitated fading memories. I could hear the voice and clarity of mind I remembered. I could see the through-line again of a life well lived. Listening to those tapes connected the past to the present.

It didn't change the fact that he was slipping away, but it gave him back much of the fullness he deserved. It allowed me to see the person whole again instead of succumbing to the idea that he was somehow less than.

Family circumstances are different for all of us, but I think the value of hindsight might be the same. We will miss them, and nothing will return us fully to them. 

But we can return to the moments that remind us of who they were, and how we were with them.