6th Place Winner: Olivia Chen

Love and My Grandmother

In my memories, my grandmother has short black hair and a soft, wrinkled and warm face full of energy and enthusiasm. When she visited me she would cook a grand smorgasbord of spicy dishes. I would set the table while she hurried about the kitchen in a graceful dancelike way. In the mornings she cooked fried egg and rice for me and in the evenings we went on walks and watched the sunset. This is how I remembered my grandmother. Though for years I didn't see my grandmother, I listened to her on the telephone and in my mind I watched as her mind fell into simplicity.

My mother handed me the telephone. I could hear my grandmother's scratchy voice murmuring slurs of befuddled Chinese on the other end.

"Hi Waipo." My voice issued clearly into the receiver.

Waipo struggled with her response, "Ya ya, ni hao?" Her voice tapered off. Waipo used to speak in such a rapid fire of clean articulated Chinese that I was often only able to catch fragments of her story. But this phone conversation was different. Waipo's words weren't sharp and sure. She spoke slowly and she stated my name, questioningly. Anxious, I tried to converse with Waipo like we used to. I asked her if my Chinese had improved. After a lengthy pause she responded, but her response was disconcertingly lifeless. After another lengthy pause, she greeted me again.

This incident was my first glimpse into my grandmother's developing condition and the future of my relationship with my grandmother. I was young, still in elementary school, so I didn't fully comprehend the gravity of the impending situation. After my phone conversation with my grandmother I told my mother that Waipo kept re-greeting me. My mother is usually composed and handles distressing situation with an eerie coolness, but when I described my conversation with Waipo my mother's placid coolness cracked, then shattered.

The next day around noon, my mother took me out of school and we went to lunch. Neither of us had spoken since the day before and the car ride maintained that silence. I was comforted knowing that whatever news I was going to discover, would wait until after the car ride and after lunch.

We ate our meals silently. To others it may have seemed as if there was some unexplainable enmity between my mother and I, but the tension and silence stemmed from nervousness and apprehension. I gulped down my lunch and sat staring at my mother. My mother smiled lightly and began elucidating her behavior yesterday. A year ago, Waipo had begun exhibiting symptoms of the early stages of Alzheimer's, a gradual and neurologically deteriorating disease. My phone conversation with Waipo was troubling because it indicated that Waipo's mind was decaying more rapidly than expected. My mother's eyes turn glassy. She swallowed her rising emotion and concluded saying that Waipo would slowly, but significantly change.

The years following rolled on steadily. I spoke with Waipo on the phone every week. Our conversations would last briefly before Waipo would ask to whom she was speaking with or before she would set down the phone and wander off to pursue the tailcoats of some fleeting thought.

Eventually my grandmother couldn't live alone. She moved under my cousin's care, but as she grew more dependent and more senile, my cousin couldn't care for her anymore. I asked my mother if Waipo could live with us. My mother gently embraced me and said that she would love nothing better but we couldn't give Waipo the vigilance she needed and our home was already too crowded with four people in its 1700 square foot floors.

Within the year, my grandmother moved back to Taiwan where she lived in an apartment with her second son and his family. I still spoke with Waipo over the phone. Our cyclical conversations lasted longer as I had learned how to keep my grandmother involved. I cut through the beginnings of any silence with chatter about my life or her life. Our conversations were repetitive, but even the repeated topics sparked some interest and animation in my grandmother's normally monotone drawl.

In high school I continued my phone conversations with Waipo. Waipo changed from robotic and emotionless to curious like a child. I stifled tears when Waipo asked me to re-explain what tennis was or if I was living in Taiwan. She would hang on to the other line and eagerly ask questions about any ephemeral strings of thought that wisped through her mind. Though her mind dwindled to infancy, she preserved one important aspect of her former self: love. She held on to the simple passions and joys of life. She marveled at the raindrops that sheeted her apartment window, the rich sunset that played upon the rooftops of skyscrapers, and she delighted in seeing the rainclouds wash over Taipei. Waipo truly saw the silver lining and she taught me to appreciate the littlest gifts of life.

When I was fifteen I finally had the opportunity to visit Waipo in Taiwan. When she opened the door to her apartment I saw how drastically she had changed. Her aged face was topped with a mop of oily hair and her clothes looked disordered and rough. Regardless of her appearance, the love she conveyed to me on the phone remained the same. She beamed at me and swept me into a tight embrace, rocking me in her arms. The years I spent listening to her mind grow shallower and more forgetful I remembered thinking I was going to lose Waipo to disease. But in that moment, when she rushed me into her hug, I realized that Alzheimer's was never going to touch her core essence, which was love. No matter how infantile or sickly Waipo grew, she would hold a small flame. And that flame would burn throughout her life.