visiting my grandma

my grandma was born in 1915, which means that later this year she'll turn 94 years old. she got alzheimer's several years back, and while i don't know all about that disease, what that means is that we have trouble communicating with each other. a couple of years ago, my family on my dad's side all met up in maui to visit her, and she would mumble/stutter a lot, and it was mainly in ilocano, which basically meant i didn't understand a word. now, she doesn't speak any language but smiles.

when she recognizes someone she breaks out with a huge smile and even sometimes starts laughing. last night she did that, she pointed at me and started laughing! i thought it was hilarious, cuz it was like she was making fun of me, so i started laughing too, and she just started laughing harder.

the only other thing i can say about her now is that she wants to eat everything! yah, yah, i know, you're probably all saying, "so that's where you get it from!" but honestly, i can't remember ever seeing my grandmother eat. she was -always- in the kitchen cooking for us, and she never sat down to dinner with us. she would always say she wasn't hungry and she preferred to cook more food. i always just figured she had picked at the food while she was cooking and wasn't hungry anymore. even when she sat down with us, she didn't eat with us, she would just put more food on our plate.

now? she's eating everything. you have to watch her carefully to make sure she doesn't grab the paper napkin off the table and start eating it. she was sitting by me earlier, and i was doing some calculus work on a piece of paper. she reached over, picked up an imaginary piece of food off my paper, and stuck it in her mouth and started chewing. she kept on doing that until i put a cookie on my paper, and then she picked up the cookies and started eating those. i kept on doing that till my mom decided to feed her a grapefruit. when she was done, my mom left the grapefruit rind on the table. i continued with my calculus until i realized my grandma had picked up the half-grapefruit rind and had started eating it! i had to wrestle the rind out of her strong hands and put it out of reach for her to stop chewing the rind. she has a healthy appetite, though, and i'm glad to see her eat =)

later on tonight i was standing in the kitchen and realized someone had put their arm around me - and i turned around and saw that it was my grandma! she had walked all the way over to me, grabbed my arm and tucked it under hers, and then dragged me across the kitchen back to the living room couch. we sat down on the couch together, and she just kept on looking at me and kept on laughing.

it's nice to be able to spend time with her even though we don't get to communicate in the typical way... i'm enjoying being able to feed her lunch, sit next to her at church, and just see her look at me and laugh and smile.

i guess i'm just glad we're sharing a lot of laughs this weekend =)