Introduction

This blog is dedicated to my maternal grandmother, Nana. I had the good fortune to live with my Nana and Pop between ages 4 to 11. They were an amazing couple who first met when they were about 5 years old. Even after 50 years of marriage, they still had regular date nights and held hands often. They did everything together.

I have many small memories of my Nana. She burned hamburgers and just about anything else she tried to cook. She often went on diets consisting of a hamburger patty and cottage cheese, long before anyone had heard of the Atkins Diet. She took mega doses of vitamins and ate grapefruit long before it was faddish. She saw auras. She always had birds - parrots, lovebirds, cockatoos, parakeets. But she got rid of a favorite cockatoo, who had bonded to her, when it bit me to the bone one visit. She taught me to play Rockmaninov on the piano before my hands were big enough for the chords. Most importantly, she taught me it was OK to be quirky and that one's manners were much more important than one's looks.

My Pop lost his battle with COPD and congestive heart failure on November 22, 2003. It is this moment that I believe started my Nana's decline or at least made it more noticeable. She worked full time teaching piano and organ from her home as well as playing music for churches and funeral homes until she began to lose her vision to macular degeneration in 2004. It is not many who can say they had successful careers into their mid 80s.

My Nana had a brief interlude of joy after my Pop's death when she reconnected with Barney, a childhood friend who lost his wife within a month of my Pop's death.

My mother, who lives with Nana, has been emailing me with stories of Nana for the last few years. It is amazing to me how Alzheimer's disease creeps in. The signs have been there for years, looking back at these old emails, but it is really only recently that it has begun to impede her functioning and interactions with others. Unfortunately I am missing some great blocks of time where the emails have been lost. Even so it should be possible to see the slow loss of function and the oddities of behavior.