In a strange twist of events, my 86-year-old grandpa and I have found new common ground in the past year. After his wife (my grandma) was put in an Alzheimer's care facility last summer and my roommate moved to Mongolia to teach English last fall, we both found ourselves living alone.
My family and I were a bit worried about my grandpa at first. For about five years he single-handedly cared for his wife during her descent from merely repeating the same few stories every time you'd visit with her to having delusions that there was a strange, angry man living in the front room of their house. He's just now finding the jewelry she hid from the "other man" in their home. After daily bathing and dressing her, watching her every step to make sure she didn't hurt herself, and not being able to leave their home because she didn't want to be out of his presence and yet wasn't capable of venturing out herself, he finally admitted to himself and others that he couldn't handle it anymore.
My family and I have watched in grief as the matriarch of our family has slid into another world where she usually doesn't recognize her three sons and where she does a little shuffle dance when prodded by her hall-mates (something this "proper" woman would have never done before). We held our breath as we waited to see if this cruel disease would claim another life—the man to whom she's been married for six decades and who usually allowed her to be the center of attention. With the "star" and his mate for a majority of his life a couple miles away in a medical facility filled with equally delusional and degenerating people, we worried he would wither too.
Thankfully, we've been pleasantly surprised. And in that way in which God can bring beauty from ashes (one of my favorite of his specialties), I've gotten to know my grandpa in the past year in ways I never have before. I've watched him join a brown-bag men's lunch group at his church, go to movies on his own, read the classic books he first enjoyed in his youth, and take part in a pick-up senior bowling league last summer. When my mom suggested he get a dog to help keep him company, he decided against it saying he didn't want to be that tied down—a comment that still brings a smile to my face.
Another thing that makes me smile is the fact that when I've flown home for the past several family gatherings, my grandad's asked me at some point how I'm adjusting to living alone. His concern for my transition warms my heart, and usually starts us on a conversation about the struggle of cooking for one and the wonderful freedom of having the tube and the fridge to ourselves. At our family gatherings at the end of last year, my grandpa and I balanced out the numbers in our paired-off family—there were my parents, my sister and brother-in-law, my aunt and uncle, my other set of grandparents, and my grandpa and me.
I watched with sorrow when he drove away from our Thanksgiving gathering at my sister's house all alone for the first time on a holiday. I said a special prayer for God's presence to be with him in his car and when he got home, then I mentioned to my parents that we should call him when we got home to make sure he'd made it okay and just so he'd have one more personal contact before he turned in for the night. As a fellow "single," I know the sometimes-hollow feeling of leaving a fun party alone and returning to your solo home. I think God's using me to raise my parents' awareness to this and a few of the other challenges of singleness—since they're local and seeking tangible ways to ease his transition and make him feel loved and included.
And, in turn, my grandpa's been a great role model of a smooth, successful transition to living alone. As my time going solo has increased, I've needed this. When I first wrote about the joys of living alone last spring, I had no idea I was in my own kind of honeymoon period. I had yet to be sick at home alone or to experience my first solo winter, including the shortest day of the year (meaning the least amount of sunlight) last month. I also had no idea how much my former roommate and I would enjoy spontaneous fun together—going to movies at the last minute on Sunday nights (to eke out the last bit of weekend fun) and driving into nearby Chicago when picture-perfect Saturdays presented themselves to us. I'm all for spontaneous solo fun, but after a while, a buddy with whom to share these adventures would be great. Our Saturday morning tradition of sleeping in, making banana-chocolate-chip pancakes, and watching cheesy reruns on TV, have been replaced with me sitting groggily on the couch eating toaster waffles and wishing I had cable. I've discovered that staying in your pjs until noon on Saturday with someone is fun, without anyone else sometimes seems lazy. And when I returned from a week of constant people, love, and activity with my family over Christmas to an empty apartment for several days until I returned to work, I was downright depressed.
