The Slow Death of Grandma Levine

Lorraine shares with us her trouble trying to break into the funeral director industry.

A eulogy for Knut - the most famous polar bear ever to have lived.

Finella tells Eulogy about her work at Great Ormond Street helping children with life-limiting illnesses.

Julie writes a eulogy for her grandmother who died after suffering dementia for many years.

Almost two years ago, my grandmother passed away. Hers was a death that had been slowly incoming since I was a young girl of about six or seven, shortly after my grandfather passed. It started with slight memory loss, but as the years went on it got worse, to the point that I started to feel as if I never really had the chance to know my real grandmother. After all, upon reaching the age when I was old enough to sustain real memories, her mind was already too far demented to share any of the stereotypical grandmother-granddaughter bonding experiences with me. There were no home-cooked meals or movie dates or shopping trips where she would buy me candy and spoil me behind my parents’ backs.

Typically the time I spent with her took place in her small apartment complex in Coral Gables, Florida, where my parents would lure me to with promises of being able to go swimming in the pool there. At six or seven I hadn’t the slightest conception of what dementia meant, and I selfishly disliked speaking to a woman who would ask me the same questions every few minutes or so. I could tell her time and time again that I was enjoying myself in school and that I didn’t have a boyfriend yet, but she could never seem to remember.

Over the years I became more respectful, realizing my parents simply wanted me to know what was left of my grandmother while she was still alive. By then the dementia grew worse, moving from slight memory loss to full on confusion. My parents had to hire a stay-at-home nurse for her because she had reached the limit of being able to drive anywhere by herself. The nurse had to have a lock installed on the door so my grandmother couldn’t leave in the middle of the night, because she started believing her husband was still alive and wanted to go see him.

I remember when I was about sixteen I went to visit her with my father. That day she had even forgotten him. He reminded her that he was a physician, showing her his card, over which she wept out of pride for her son’s accomplishments. I gained a lot of respect for my dad with the way he handled his mother’s mental decline. Even when she forgot who he was, he remained calm and levelheaded.

During my second year of college I received a phone call that my grandmother was in the hospital and that she probably was not going to recover. Shortly thereafter she passed away. I think I felt most guilty that I never cried over her death, not even at the funeral. It had all been so expected. There are a lot of things you expect growing up. People are meant to die at some point. Perhaps, though, the most unexpected things emerge out of the expected, like seeing my father cry for the first and probably last time.