Part of Analea’s name comes from my grandmother whose nickname was Ana (that’s another story) and John’s mom Lea (yet another story). I think Lola’s spirit must be living in Analea because I’ve never known a child to babble so much as if she’s telling us a story. And that was something that my grandmother could do ALL DAY LONG. It didn’t matter what she was doing, she always had a story to tell us. Something would reminder her of a person or an event in her past and she would start, “When I was a little girl…” or “Did I tell you about…” Some days, I would think, “Oh no, not again.” But most days, I thought she was the most magical woman I knew. How could she possibly have done so much, know so much? I keep telling myself that I need to write as many of these stories down so that I can pass them on to Miia and Analea. They’d make great bedtime stories. Lola’s not with us any more so I lost the opportunity to get them directly from her again – either by letters or by recording her. But by the time I was old enough to think to do this, Lola was becoming a different person-one that I didn’t care to recognize because I thought if this was the last memory I had of her, then I would somehow lose the stories. The woman I was hearing about didn’t match the woman who told me the stories, the girl and the woman who lived them.

In my closet-cleaning frenzy of the past few days, I found something I had written about her 12 years ago.

“It’s hard for me to acceopt my grandmother as someone who is “losing it.” I will forever see her as the woman who was always full of stories of life – of her as a tomboy, a tennis player, a widow, a single mother way before her time, a woman who lost her husband and toddler son in the war, a WWII activist, an immigrant, a woman who worked for her kids and her kids’ kids because she “got out,” a farmer, a schoolteacher turned vegetable seller, a remarkable person, a strong woman. Now the stories have changed a bit. They are no longer told by her but instead are told about her. I am trying so hard to ignore these new stories that want to wipe her out and turn her into someone she never was in her life – weak. I can no longer ask her to “tell me the story about the time you tried to steal fruits from the mango man” because she can no longer remember things on cue like that. Instead, she is always in story mode and no one can make sense of what she’s saying. Grandma is slipping away from our family into the world of “senility” or Alzheimer’s. No one will really say which it is. I want so bad to hold on to her stories as if that will somehow keep her with us, because someone has to remember for her, someone has to put the stories in a place other than her memory or mine. Otherwise, he WHOLE LIFE disapears in a fraction of the time that she lived. But what a daunting task…to remember and document someone else’s life.”

My blog comment has gone on way too long! Thanks so much Kristen for helping me remember my grandmother. Maybe now I’ll start to remember and write down her stories.