October 10
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Angelo is happy. It's funny, really.  In all the time I have known him,  I've never considered him to be a really happy guy.  We actually all joke about the fact that nothing makes him laugh ("Except jokes about stamping on shit!" I offered, truthfully) and that he doesn't have much of a sense of humor, which is a fact.  I don't know that I've ever much considered my grandfather's happiness.  He and my grandmother have fought in the past, often heatedly: throwing things, screaming, slamming doors, someone getting up and leaving.  I knew that, but also think that I knew that he was happy, in the way that most people are, you know, things aren't terrible, I've got nothing major to complain about so maybe I'll just live my life doing what I do, neither in tears nor in wild joy.
 

When I go to visit my grandfather, he is delighted to see me.  He offers me some of the vile, wilted looking food off of his dinner plate.  He introduces me for the 5th, 10th, 20th time to the same people: "This is my GRANDDAUGHTER!! She went to COLLEGE!!"  each time, they answer "Isn't that nice, she comes to see you all the time! And she's so pretty!! What a nice girl!"  He shows me around, each time like I've never seen the place before.  ("This is my room.  See?  Here's that blanket you gave me.  See that guy?! I don't like him so much.  He's CRAZY!!") There are residents I like and residents I don't.  It's strange to me that he's been there long enough for me to have formed opinions on people, but the loud, sarcastic man with the purple feet and the giant, exposed hernia is hateful.  I remind myself that he is a sick old man.  That he is not as lucky as Angelo.  That he will not go home.  Yet, when he wheels over to us, stained and smelly, toothless and pushy and just won't go away, I am irritated, perhaps irrationally.

My grandmother met a day or so ago with the team of people who have been working with Angelo for the past three weeks.  They told her that they, in their opinion did not believe that he would improve much past how he is now.  That he'd never drive again.  That he was rehabilitated just about as much as he'd ever be.

Remember, a few weeks ago, I'd written about feeling myself go cold?  I imagine that my grandmother, sitting in a room filled with strangers, holding hands with my grandfather felt herself go cold.  That everything, everything  slowed down for just a second or two and that if she went back, she'd be able to remember with perfect recall the exact moment and phrasing when some stranger told her that her husband was as good as he'd ever be.  That she could take him home but that for the rest of her life, she would be entirely responsible for making sure he didn't fall down stairs, get behind the wheel of a car, wander off.
 

When we visit together, he seems happy there.  It is at once reassuring and frightning to me.  The longer I see him there, talking with people, the more times I walk in to see him in a wheelchair in the hall, lined up for a meal or to go outside, the more used to him being there I get, and that is the one thing I never counted on.  I believed that he'd go but not really be.  He'd go and want to be home every moment of every day.  He'd ask me for food from places we'd eaten and for rides to places we'd gone.  He'd look around and realize that he had no business being there.  Instead, he is happy.  He's surrounded by people who are, for the most part, just like him, and his family--we are the outsiders.
 
 

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