Dementia has taken many of my grandma’s memories. Today, we connect through play

It’s a look anybody who knows someone with dementia will recognise: glassy-eyed and fearful, one of total unrecognition. It’s a look that I sometimes see when I visit my grandmother. Declining to be called “Grandma” for its associations with old age, she has always been “Mama” to me.

My mama has dementia, which – as too many people know – is not a linear disease.

There are good days, when I see the warmth of recognition in her eyes as I greet her. But on other days, she looks at me with glazed, suspicious eyes, and I know I’m nothing but a stranger.

Shelling beans with Mama.

When you have a shared history with someone, the natural impulse is to revel in the past together, taking comfort in the fact that the memories so special to you are special to them too.

Selfishly, sometimes, I want to shake her and ask, “Do you remember the cakes we baked together? The gardens you taught me to tend to? The newspaper clippings you cut so carefully from The Age each week to post to me, which we’d discuss during our Sunday afternoon phone calls?”

But I don’t. Because she doesn’t remember.

And so there is the protracted grief of mourning someone simultaneously here and not here – a different kind of grief to death, although no less or no more difficult.

My grandfather passed away in September last year. An incredible force of life and accomplished economist, he was a wonderful storyteller with a wicked sense of humour. His passing raised many questions about his life, some which my father and I have been able to answer by talking to family members or researching family history, and others that remain unsolved.

I am angry at my younger self for being too preoccupied with my own life to ask more questions about my grandparents’ lives. We always assume we have more time than we do.

Now 93, my grandma lives in a nursing home in Melbourne. But in a past life, she was a journalist, working as a reporter at The Canberra Times and later ABC radio. Her family, the Sommerlads, were in the newspaper business. She followed in their footsteps, and I hers.

Like many women of her time, she stopped working when she became a mother. When my father and his two brothers were a little older, she started a career in the Victorian Department of Conservation. And in her later years, she edited the monthly newsletter for The Royal Botanic Gardens, a role which married her love of the written word and gardening.

Baking a cake.

Unfortunately, by the time I became a journalist, most of her memories of that time had faded. She sometimes spoke about covering the late Queen Elizabeth’s first visit to Australia, for which she had to purchase a pair of elbow-length gloves, but I don’t know much else.

There are many things I would like to ask her about her life, like how it felt being a woman in the male-dominated field of journalism. I would like to know what she was like as a young girl. I want to ask her about when she fell in love with my grandfather, where they went on their first date and when she knew he was the one.

Painting Mama’s nails in the nursing home.

While I may never get answers to these questions, I have found new ways of being with my mama.

She may not be able to tell me about her years as a young journalist, or what she had for breakfast that day, but together we can still delight in the twists and turns her mind takes.

The rules of this are a bit like improv theatre’s maxim of “yes, and” – never say no, never correct, never deny, just yes, and. Following this rule, we come together in a world of play where I try to meet her where she is – even if that world isn’t entirely rooted in reality.

Today, while speaking we might start in the 1940s, during her childhood, take a sharp left into an imaginary world and then catapult forward to the present day. Backflips, somersaults, cartwheels, wherever her mind goes, I will happily follow.

Yes, and.

My mama has always had a knack for wordplay. When I take her down to the cafe on the ground level of her nursing home, she surveys the cabinet of baked goods carefully, even though we have been there many times before. Eyes landing on the date and walnut slice, a favourite of ours, she says, “who’s going out on a date? The walnut? How lovely for him!”

We come together in a world of play where I try to meet her where she is – even if that world isn’t entirely rooted in reality.

Another time, after lunch, she says, “I don’t have a brass razoo to pay for this!”

“I’m out of coins too. How about we do a runner?” I say to her, and we both laugh.

There are some qualities my mama has retained into her old age that have helped us play together. Her hatred of purple runs deep to this day, causing her to cover her eyes in anguish as if the sight of it brings her physical pain.

Sixty years my senior, her eyesight is better than mine, and her hearing finely tuned. In cafes, she has a cheeky tendency to eavesdrop on strangers’ conversations.

“Mark is getting a divorce,” she’ll tell me with a knowing look. I scold her gently, but also whisper back, “Yes, that Mark is terrible” and we giggle together like schoolgirls. I know it is impolite to eavesdrop, but I figure our gossiping is harmless fun. And there’s a lot you can get away with when you’re elderly.

I often wonder what it is like to live inside her mind. I imagine it is often scary and lonely. But in her world, where past, present and future are collapsed into one, dementia has not yet dimmed her appreciation for life’s beauty.

She has always loved the crisp blue of the sky on a clear day. She always takes a beat to admire the floral pattern of a chair’s upholstery, the warble of a magpie’s song, or the sparkle of an earring.

My mind, still (relatively) sharp, is often preoccupied with work, or what I’m having for dinner. Trivial things in the big picture. Being with her reminds me what really matters, and to open my eyes to what’s in front of me.

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