I sit in the back seat of the car playing Candy Crush on my phone, my dad drives, and my mom sits in the passenger seat. The car turns the corner and enters a private road flanked by two regal stone pillars, each marked with a brass Queen Road plaque adorned with a symbolic crown. The winding, uphill drive is surrounded on both sides by wide, bucolic lawns replete with brass garden sculptures and a decorative gazebo. Up ahead, I see a low-rise building and notice movement inside. We bear left toward the entrance, and my dad parks the car in one of the spaces hidden from the front of the building by a series of high, well manicured hedges. My family walks past the fountain toward the entrance, where I open the two sets of heavy plate glass doors of this five star property. We enter the cheerfully decorated yet sophisticated lobby and my dad signs in while exchanging small talk with the chatty receptionist, but is interrupted by the impulsive shriek of the resident parrot.

When I inhale, I am assaulted by a positively unpleasant ‘old people’ odor, which cannot be described accurately with words. This is the Queen Road Nursing Home, where my ninety one year old paternal grandmother has lived for the past five years, following her second massive stroke. Her first devastating stroke occurred almost eight years ago, six weeks after her husband of fifty years died unexpectedly on Mother’s Day. My family and I were staying in a hotel near my grandparents’ suburban Philadelphia home on that tragic Mother’s Day with plans to join my grandparents for brunch when my grandmother telephoned with an early wake-up call. Instead of meeting to celebrate Mother’s Day, we met my grandmother at a hospital where my grandfather had already been pronounced dead. That visit, when I was eight years old, clearly was not the one to which I had been looking forward, and heralded my grandmother’s progressive deterioration to this day.
Nevertheless, my grandmother’s physical recovery and endurance have far exceeded her doctors’ wildest expectations. Although she long advocated what she referred to as “healthful” eating and living, ever since her doctors removed the feeding tube directly into her stomach that she required for months after her second stroke, my grandmother has derived great joy from bacon, hot dogs, cookies, and ice cream, which have emerged as staples of her diet. Clearly, she has survived not by reason of wholesome nourishment, but by virtue of some incomprehensible, intangible resolve.

My grandmother lived in the Philadelphia area for her entire life until she could no longer live independently following her first stroke. My parents then, as she bitterly referred to it, “uprooted her like a tree” and relocated her to a retirement facility in our hometown in New York so we could adequately care for her and visit her frequently. Prior to her move, I did not spend a tremendous amount of time with my grandmother, only short weekend visits a few times per year.

In her better days, my grandmother, a retired teacher who taught until age eighty, was passionate about learning, showered me with books, offered to help me with my schoolwork, clipped news articles to share, proudly listened to me play piano, and praised my artistic creations. Despite my family’s encouragement, she has not touched the tall stack of reading material in her room at Queen Road, and recently told us that Eisenhower is the current President. A fastidious and dignified Main Line Philadelphia woman, she always displayed proper etiquette, but easily engaged in pleasant small talk. However, since her strokes, her interests and passions have waned along with her memory, attention span, conversational ability, concern with her personal appearance, and sense of time and place. My grandmother harbors some prejudices and pretensions; in the past, she attempted to be subtle and not reveal them, but now all of her mental filters are broken. Unlike some stroke victims, whose speech becomes slurred, my grandma’s voice (when she chooses to speak) remains clear and distinct, although much of what she says does not make sense. I could fill a library with the tales that precede and follow her arrival at Queen Road, but each of my weekly visits is a story of its own.

My mind wanders as I wonder what kind of conversation I will have with my grandmother today. Will she be pleasant and talkative, or ornery and morose? Will she be struggling to speak only in rhyme, attempting to speak German (a language she never studied), or pretending to be mute? Will she assert that she has just returned from vacation or is getting ready to leave for camp (immediately after I mention that I have just returned from vacation or am getting ready to leave for camp)? Will she be moving or “checking out” soon? Will she remember her deceased husband or will she be a fifteen-year-old girl who has just spoken with her “mommy”? Will she realize that her only child, only grandchild, and only daughter-in-law are visiting her today?

As we walk into the building and turn left on our way to the nursing desk, we pass a woman who constantly does laps in her wheelchair around the pentagon-shaped building while repeating a two-tone humming then grunting sound that reminds me of a doorbell, and a cage containing a large, colorful parrot. A couple of young children attempt to engage the parrot in conversation, while a few adults are doing the same with a ‘resident’ (as the staff calls them). A dozen or so residents are slouched in wheelchairs lining the walls around the circular nursing desk. A nurse at the desk informs us that my grandmother is in the paradoxically named activities room.

When we open the door to the activities room, the stench grows almost unbearable, and I begin to feel queasy. As soon as she sees us walk in, one woman cries out, “Where are you Mama? Mama, take me home, Mama! Mama, why won’t you take me home....” The staff has faced most of the residents in the general direction of a large flat screen television. Some sit in their wheelchairs with their eyes closed. Others with oxygen tubes running into their noses and drool dripping from their open mouths appear to be sleeping on stretchers with adjustable backs, which resemble lounge chairs on wheels. The remainder stare absentmindedly. While it is clear that the residents have no interest in or comprehension of the television broadcast, their caretakers, the nursing aides, are paying rapt attention to the screen.

I spot my grandmother sitting upright in her wheelchair by the window, gazing out toward the courtyard, scratching her sore-covered arms. When my dad and I approach her, she exclaims, as usual, how happy she is to see us. My dad wheels her out of the activities room to a sitting area near the main entrance where my parents and I sit down on a couch and turn her wheelchair to face us. In typical form and as if on cue, her first question is, “Have you had dinner yet?”

My dad responds that we have not yet eaten dinner, but that we will eat dinner after our visit, and then asks her what she ate for dinner (which ended about ten minutes before we arrived). She has no idea. In an attempt to make conversation, my mom asks her whether she watched a movie or did anything else of interest today. Again, my grandma has no clue and repeats, “Have you had dinner yet?” to which we reiterate our response.

I then ask her, in as cheerful a tone as I can manage, in an attempt to coax her to talk, “How are you feeling? The staff called us this week to tell us that you fell a few nights ago.” Forgetting that she is unable, my grandma sometimes attempts to walk to the bathroom or elsewhere. Likewise, she does not remember her fall, which, thankfully, this time did not result in significant injury.

I begin to tell my grandma about school, but she begins to look around in various directions and is clearly not focused on or cannot hear what I am saying. A few years ago, a mention of school would have spurred her to comment that she needs to wake up early the next day to teach. My grandmother is also almost completely deaf, but has repeatedly refused to wear hearing aids, arguing (when she believed she was still teaching), “What will my students say?” I continue to prattle on, speaking more loudly, and suddenly, she interrupts and corrects a grammatical error in my sentence. She often forgets that she was a teacher (and usually does not remember her husband), but she certainly has not forgotten correct grammar.

During the numerous pauses in our conversation, my mom pleads with my grandma not to scratch her arms because she is creating unattractive and unhealthy sores. Prior to her descent into dementia, my grandmother was always concerned, perhaps overly so, with her appearance. She stops for a moment, and then resumes this activity.
My dad asks her whether anyone has visited her recently, and she responds that she had been out with her parents today. Today, we decide not to tell her that her long deceased parents would be at least 120 years old by now. Sometimes, we just ignore her fantasies by changing the subject of the conversation to make the visit less painful for her (and us), while other times, we attempt to jolt her back to reality.
My grandma then stares straight at me, then at my parents and remarks, “Whom does he resemble? He does not look like either of you.” I had been waiting for this question, as she asks it almost every time we visit.

“No, Grandma, I definitely look like a combination of my parents. That’s how genetics works,” I respond.

Behind my grandmother, I notice the parrot swinging itself back and forth contentedly on a perch hanging from the top of its cage. It suddenly squawks, “Hello!” and poops. It then busily begins to peck at its bright turquoise and yellow feathers and gnaw at its cage, before it reverts to swinging and repetitive chattering, ignoring passersby and all that is going on around it.

Suddenly, my grandma offers, “I’ll walk you to the door.”
“No, Grandma, we aren’t leaving yet. We want to spend some more time with you. And you shouldn’t try to walk; you’ll just hurt yourself,” I tell her. In reaction she gives my mom her classic, confused look that asks, “He’s crazy, right?”

My dad begins to tell her about his job as a lawyer and his recent business trip to California.
“Where did you go to law school?” my grandma interrupts him.
He retorts, “Mother, you know where I went to law school. Think about it....”
“Harvard?”

“No, that’s where Helene went. I went to Boston University.” Grandma never remembers where he went to law school, but always remembers that my mom went to Harvard.

“Oh, have you had dinner yet?” she asks again.

“Here we go again,” I think to myself, “she just hit the rewind button.”

I am about to respond when one of the nursing aides walks by and gives my grandma a big hug. “Stellie is such a sweetheart. I call her my mommy,” she tells us. “She never gives me any trouble.” My grandmother looks absolutely horrified, as if she has never seen this woman before, and gives us her signature puzzled expression again.

After we continue our often repetitive conversation for several more minutes, my dad checks his watch and realizes it is time for us to leave. We roll my grandma back to the activities room, kiss her goodbye, and tell her that we love her and will see her soon. The scene inside seems to have remained frozen in time since we first arrived. As I exit the activities room, I glance back at her and see that she has begun to scratch her arms again and play with napkins stacked on her ‘chair buddy,’ a thick, large, stiff cushion that is placed over her lap and connected to the armrests of her wheelchair, preventing her from standing up.

On the way out, I sadly contemplate that her dementia, which is slowly killing her, ironically also facilitates her will to live. Her fantasies and inability to remember or comprehend the reality of life at Queen Road Nursing Home sustain her. As we walk past the birdcage, which the nurses had covered for the night with a flowered quilted comforter identical to the ones covering the residents’ beds, I realize that my grandmother’s life is frighteningly similar to that of the parrot.