"Today, I didn’t meet anyone or say a single word until you called me. The trees in the garden don’t talk to me."
When the early signs of dementia began to appear, my grandmother said this to me over the phone. After my grandfather passed away and the dog they had for many years also died, my grandmother lived alone in a quiet house. Although my parents visited frequently, an overwhelming sense of "being alone" surrounded her.
When people lose their connections with family and society, they may gradually lose sight of the meaning of their own existence. And the body tries to physiologically avoid that pain. Or perhaps the mind "wants" to fade those memories away. Listening to my grandmother’s voice over the phone, I found myself thinking about these things.
Then, this summer. On the day we went to visit the graves with my parents, my father, who was with me all day, never once called my name. My father, who always prefixed his words with the other person’s name like a kind of greeting, didn’t do so even once.
Seeing his back, which had become one or two sizes smaller than when he was active, I saw my grandmother’s figure reflected in it. It has finally come—. The reality I had somehow prepared myself for, when it actually appeared before me, felt oppressively heavy, clinging to my body, and left me with a deeply gloomy feeling.
My father, a typical member of the "baby boomer generation," who ran through the height of the economic boom and devoted his life to work. Even after retirement, he worked for a while, but a few years ago, after a fall at work that injured his legs and hips, he stepped back from the front lines and started spending more time at home. Perhaps it was around that time that I began to sense a faint discomfort in the edges of our conversations.
The loneliness of seeing someone else (my father) gradually lose the memories and time they have built up. Is it the pain of reliving that process by his side? Or is it my own sadness of being "forgotten" by my own parent? I still can’t sort it out.
Even so, the fading of memories may be both loneliness and kindness. I believe there is a loneliness that can only be endured by forgetting. Still, I hope the voice calling out that name will reach him until the very end.