gone, baby, gone

So my Grandma - my dad's mom - appears now to have rounded the last bend into dementia. It's unclear what, if anything, caused this but her ability to hang on to a present narrative or to recognize people seems to have mostly disappeared. Evidently she eventually recognized my dad yesterday, but that was pretty much the high point before she descended back into upset about living outdoors (?) and where were the students (?) and why no one had told her that she left the oven on (?). I can, if I squint, kind of make some sketchy relationships between what she's saying and her circumstances - she is outside her apartment, in the health center, so maybe she thinks of it as outdoors? That sort of thing.

It feels like she's died. She's always been smart, funny, and tender with me, and our relationship has been characterized by long talks - about books, politics, family members, ideas, and professional basketball (for years, I followed her beloved Miami Heat just well enough to be able to talk with her about them). Her physical decline in her 90s, while of course troubling, was a lot less upsetting when she was still reading and talking and complaining about what an idiot George W Bush was (we got a lot of mileage out of him. Just the sight of his face and she'd scathingly say "Look at him! He's so stupid. Does he even know what's going on?")

I'm tempted to write more, to memorialize her now, but that seems wrong - or at least, impolite. But it feels like the big mourning has started for me, and that her eventual physical death will feel more like a relief than a sorrow. I am having the sorrow now, as the Grandma I've loved and sparred with for all my thirty-seven years has slipped past the last screen, where I can't follow.