About my grandparents, Alzheimer's and what defines us

What turns me into myself? I have answered countless personal profiles on the internet, written texts and more texts, whose autobiographical character was sometimes explicit and sometimes disguised; I have in my history a long list of sessions with many different psychologists and psychiatrists and, however, I still can’t say. For centuries, we have been asking what defines us, since specialists like philosophers from all times and geneticists to the teenager in an identity crisis who has been writing in their diary: many are those who try to find solutions for our existential doubts. Human individuality is one of our biggest mysteries.

In the debate "breeding versus nature," there is a discussion about whether genetics are stronger than how we are raised. And I ask myself the real role of our memories in this thorough and detailed seam of aspects that forms us. These questions happen while I observe my paternal grandfather, called Eneas. He is in an advanced state of Alzheimer's and, after mixing beans, rice, and ground beef and distributing the mess evenly through the plate (properly pressed by the fork), has decided he won’t be having lunch, but the plate can’t be taken away from him. I can’t say I’ve met my grandpa’s personality in depth before the disease took over his mind. He was always a grumpy figure, who inserted curse words in all his speeches, loved vulgar jokes and words, and spent the whole day inside his chaotic office writing a book that never ended. My grandfather looked, to my eyes, like an extremely ludicrous figure. I couldn’t understand how that character, who was always singing My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean around the house, and even with all his anger seemed to have come straight from a cartoon, could be the same protagonist of the terrible stories I heard about his behavior in the past.

I don’t remember ever commenting with my relatives though, about this detach between the stories they told and the image I had while observing my grandfather. His excess of rage, or whatever it was that took over him while speaking to his children and my grandmother aggressively, was an undeniable fact in my family. I, in reality, was able to observe a few situations in which I was surprised by his skill in using words in a moment to hurt his relatives, and in the following second to trust the most complete stranger that was passing by. But I didn’t live with that human being as closely as I liked to think not long ago, and I had already been feeling a bit orphaned of grandparents. My maternal grandmother, ever since I can remember, had always been in a very advanced state of this so-called Alzheimer’s – a word whose writing I learned very early on due to the extensive research I did on the subject, in an attempt to understand why my grandmother had never recognized me and why I never even heard her voice. While my other grandfather, my mother’s dad, moved to Fortaleza while I was still very little. I have vague and darkened memories of a big black dog and an old enormous grandfather clock at his house in Brasilia, I saw him very few times after that. So I consider that my difficulty in being able to see my grandfather as this bad figure comes partly from this lack of closer interaction and partly from a desperate will to preserve something good about my last grand-paternal bond. In the case of my maternal grandmother, since everything I know about her life and person pre-disease comes from what other people told me, my illusion around the subject was clearer, while with my grandpa Eneas I could deceive myself more convincingly.

Today I realize, however, how little I know about him, which is the reason I question why I find it so weird how he changed after Alzheimer’s became more apparent. If before my grandfather was a character from a 3D animated cartoon produced with the highest digital technology, like those that can almost be confused with real life, today he is a character from a children’s book, bi-dimensional, flattened, almost stripped of his human essence. In a few moments, I still recognize him as the same as ever, after a “fuck it” chanted like only he can do, or in the music he still whistles frequently, calling longingly for his Bonnie lying over the ocean as if Bonnie was his lost sanity. But most of the time, I look at my grandfather and can’t recognize him like before. We feel the need to define everything around us all the time, it’s our way of understanding the world and I remember learning about that in semiotics at college with one of my favorite teachers. Maybe that’s why I have taken ownership of the little I knew and could observe of that person, even if the material was scarce, I amended those pieces, filling in the blanks with my own needs and expectations until a whole image was formed. Still, at the peak of my efforts, I see very few of those pieces today, no matter how many of them are actually his and how many are my vision of him, in this figure that walks around the house holding a ball as if he were a child. I ask myself, if all my memories were erased, would I still be me?