My grandmother turned 90 today.

Nine decades.

That’s a very long time to live.

When I think of my grandmother, I think of the photo above.

I imagine her brain, with two huge holes where neurons and synapses should exist.

My grandmother has Alzheimer’s.

The last time she remembered who I was was before I left to study in Australia.

When I came back for Christmas in between my two-year stint overseas, she could still talk coherently but she couldn’t remember me.

After I came back to Singapore, she didn’t really speak English any more, reverting to a combination of Kristang (a pidgin Portuguese language spoken by Portuguese Eurasians) and Malay.

And I didn’t exist in her worldview, which just kept on progressively diminishing.

Alzheimer’s Disease photo by AJ Cann.
Reproduced under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.