Yesterday's post was brief, and sort of melodramatic. I'm sorry about that. We had to get my grandmother back to take her medication before she totally blew her cork.

That's the first thing here that's much worse than I imagined: my grandmother is no longer suffering from a bit of senile dementia, she's got full-blown Alzheimer's. She thinks I'm about 9 feet tall and that she still lives in Pennsylvania. She talked to her younger sister, who arrived yesterday for this deathwatch, for about 20 minutes and didn't realize who the woman was. At all. She kept saying, "You & I must be related." At first we thought she was joking. It soon became apparent that she was not.

The worst thing is that, up until right this fucking minute, my grandmother has no idea that her daughter was dying. And when I say "right this fucking minute," I'm not kidding. The irony here is that the only place on my Aunt & Uncle's property which has internet connectivity is the finished outbuilding referred to as Donna's Playhouse. This is the addition my Aunt had built as her private sanctum, where she could do her researches and pursue her projects undisturbed. This is her favorite place. And she's dying in it. Not 12 feet from where I'm sitting.

So, while I was writing the paragraph about my grandmother's Alzheimer's disease, my grandmother was sitting at my Aunt's bedside, staring at her. My greataunt, the very sister my grandmother didn't recognize yesterday, was telling me about bluegrass artists she used to go see in Radio Park as a teenager. My grandmother very suddenly & viciously said "Shhhhhh!" Then she stood, moved towards my aunt and began to shake and cry.

The synapses fire slower, and at random intervals, but they still work. She got it quicker than it would take an infinite number of monkeys to come up with Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. But not much.