Notes From a Dark Room

        Here I am. Stuck in a big lonely place, in a small lonely world. Tonight, I am guardian for my grandmother, watching the threshold of reality. She has just recently been diagnosed with Schizophrenia or Dementia, or something. The psychologists make their educated guess. You know, thousands of people suffer one disorder, thousands of brains always deteriorate in the same way. But even at that, the three or four ways it could deteriorate, the doctors are not sure. That's why we have adjectives to fit them in place--elderly onset, acute, this and that. Yet one thing is for sure, that two weeks ago my grandmother was found knocking on a neighboor's door trying to get help for the a man who was dying under the snow. You see, the next door neighbor is a married mormon man, and she thinks he wants to marry her instead.

She also thinks there's a portal in her basement to the mormon church.

        And so, I am here. Sitting on a rocking couch, laptop in front of me, and a dresser on my right with recent christmas cards sitting nicely on top. My sister apparently sent her a card that opens a gingerbread house. The kitchen is on my left, and candy beckons me on the counter. Grandma was already asleep when I came to the house for the night. She left a note that said, "I am tired so I am going to bed. Eat what you want and sleep when you want, just be sure to turn off the lights when you do." Some remnants of papers are left by the cutting board. Two letters stacked on top of a plain white square of paper. I removed the two letters to reveal the white square with cursive scribble. Being the godly woman she is, grandma had left some notes for herself, maybe from a sermon. This is what it said:

Sit at the feet of God
FEAR keep us from doing this and that
FEAR shackles us

I need to reanalyze my basic personality.

        Maybe inspiring words for herself to overcome her hallucinations. She was always a very strong person, brilliant in every way. At eighty-seven years old she still drives, walks, reads history books and literature, and can even outdo me in a shopping trip. It doesn't take long to see that my grandmother must've been beautiful young--she is beautiful now. But now I am here, a 19-year old girl, watching over her, the one who can see through her hallucinations and tell her they are not real. The man next door does not want to marry her. There are no reporters to reveal her secret.

        What I did not know was anything. Grandfather died ten years ago, close to Thanksgiving when he could not come to the table. For ten years, at least, my mother has known that grandma has been seeing things, people in her mirror and lights melting floors at night. Ten years. Ten years in a big house alone, a house that could easily a six member family. Watching lights melt the floor. Portals in your basement. My mom admitted to me three years ago that grandma was afraid people were breaking into her home, but nothing of the crazy sort. I was never to tell grandmother, she is much to reserved to let anyone know she is not the same brilliance she always is, even if she's terrified of her own bedroom.

        She stayed in the hospital for five days. The first two days she was supposedly completely crazy, telling mom that the church ladies needed her to do things. When I came home from college, I saw her the third day, and she was completely fine. The last two days seemed hazy and the only skeptical thing, the only thing that seemed different from the usual grandma besides the wig off and the hospital robes, was that she asked me if this was to be in the newspaper. She was let out Christmas Day, and my aunt and mother have been staying with her since. But they must go back to work, and my aunt back to Michigan, so I offered myself to sleep over at night. I came at seven, when she goes to sleep, and I have no television and no internet to keep me entertained until the time I usually go to bed at 2-3am. That leaves me with a laptop, Vanilly Sky, Hannibal Rising, and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant. Also, a new CD by Phillip Glass and an ongoing obsession with Radiohead.

        But even with twice the amount of people in this house it is half unused. I tried to leave my imprint of living into different parts of the house, but the basement is cold and somewhat dark. The porch is also cold. Half the outlets do not accept the tri-pronged plug to my laptop charger. This house has an eerie feeling of death to it. Miracle that someone still lives here. The house is perfectly clean, obviously kept up by the bored hands of an eighty year old woman. It's pristine-ness is almost depressing, it makes me just sit and stare, thinking of how a one woman could live here for so long, and not even so long as much as under such circumstances. When you've lived your whole life with other people, living alone is scary. It's one thing to get an apartment by yourself, it's another thing to get a house with children and a husband and suddenly be the only one remaining. She's also got six sisters--
all dead. An image of a dying flame comes to mind, even if it was a damn good candle. 

        I have told some people that the day my grandmother dies is the day a part of my soul goes with her. I used to respect her because she could always hold good conversation, even defeating me in discussions at times. She also has a reserve that I can only admire, a head stronger than most people could ever understand. Some might say that reserve is like a container that holds problems until it fills so full it explodes, but even if this is true, I have come to believe reservations is really, truly, faith in oneself. A true faith that you know the world just as well as anybody else. And while others live their lives grasping every emotion they can soak from everyone else, reservation allows people like my granmother to analyze the world for what she takes it--and more importantly, she can analyze herself. And if it is too much to bear, better to die trying. Now she is suffering from old age, and no human being is more than their body. And if she is loopy on medication and I can no longer hold on to those intellectual discussions about civilations and theology, I still respect her all the same.

        The rest of my family is in denial. My dad keeps telling me that it is not possible for such an intelligent woman to go so insane so immediately. He explained to me that someone's grandmother once hallucinated because two chemicals in her house mixed and became toxic. He says that even the tv show House, they do not give up so easily on their patients, instead they send doctors to the house to see if anything is suspicious.

"It is just a tv show, dad."
"I know, honey. But still..."
And he scratches his head in frustration.

        Tonight, however, is not about respect, nor is it, for me, about protecting grandma from her hallucinations. Tonight is about spending one night in the perspective of a long-winded woman who knew what she wanted for herself, who despite having everything stripped away without her consent still tries to be the same woman, the accomplished woman who's lived in Germany, Liberia, Switzerland, Turkey, Singapore, and for a time even in Malaysia. Her house is a living memorium to this. It is a remnant, a shell. And in it lives the dying light, once strong.

We are no more than flesh and bones.