My grandmother is not the white-haired, soft-spoken, cookie-baking plump figure that store-bought pies have prescribed most grandmothers to be. She spits, she swears, she yells, she burps, she dodges traffic to collect pennies; this is the woman I have known my entire life, up until last week. Last week she suffered one stroke too many and wound up in the hospital. She was wild. They couldn't control her and had to move on to a second sedative after the first one didn't work. (The nurse was surprised; she had never seen anyone not respond to the former sedative). They even had physically restrained her but the aforementioned nurse loosened those straps because she thought they were too barbaric. During her hospital stay representatives from many nursing homes came to evaluate her, and all but one determined she was too much of a danger to enroll. It's been decided that she is to live with my aunt, her other daughter, six hours away. My grandmother, Nana, as I call her, has been in my life since my life began. There aren't enough virtual pages to recall all the times I've seen her, heard her voice or smelled the tomato sauce she'd make in her basement once a year gently tempting my appetite. Everyday after kindergarten ended my mother would drive me to Nana's house so my mother could go to work and I'd spend the better part of the day with her. She'd sit me on her lap and teach me Hail Mary in Italian but I could never repeat those foreign words with the same simple grace as she. Nana would make me lunch and every now and then we'd take the bus to the mall and if I was good she'd let me throw a penny into the fountain. Every Sunday, and I do mean every Sunday, we sat around her table for dinner. She'd always stand at the head of the table and scoop mountains of food on our plate, her short rotund body perpetually cloaked in homemade aprons and sweaters she'd knit herself. Nana was always there, always cooking, always sewing, always asking Jesus for one thing or another and I began to believe that she'd live forever. Only when I returned from college did I begin to sense it was the beginning of the end for her. During my breaks I'd visit her once a week or so and I could tell my grandfather's absence had taken its ugly toll. She was losing it, slowly and surely; I just wanted to make sure that I had no regrets when her time came. The changes were subtle at first and then became glaring. She couldn't remember dates, her clothes were ragged, her house was messier than usual. It came to a head a month ago when I visited her and she could not recall that I had visited only two weeks before. It was then I knew, I just knew, that her days were numbered and all I could do was passively look on. A summer ago I discovered she was an alcoholic, quite by accident. As a child, wine was a staple in her house. She and my grandfather made it every summer in their basement and I never thought twice about it. Last summer I came to visit her around noon and noticed her telltale wine mustache, a wine glass in her hand and an empty bottle on the kitchen table. She was a drunk; she always had been. She had lived most of her life behind a thick cloud of alcohol, and I had been too ignorant to realize. After that discovery the pieces began to slip into place. She was undoubtedly depressed, and the death of my grandfather had left her completely alone. Alcohol was her main comfort and her mental clarity was becoming more extinct by the day. I knew it was only a matter of time before the carpet was to slip out from beneath us, and I was right. She's an alcoholic. I knew it before any doctor did, and I said, even before the nurse could tell us, that the reason she was so combative at the hospital was because she was going through withdrawal. I never saw her act like that at the hospital; when I saw her she was heavily sedated. She looked just about dead. The thin wisps of her hair was strewn across the pillow, her mouth hung open like she was trying to yell but no sounds ever escaped her chapped, bluish lips. They did some scans and found that years of alcohol had literally put holes in her brain. They said she had dementia. Her brain was fried and essentially she ceases to be. I haven't seen her since that day in the hospital when she was unconscious and I'm unsure of whether I want to. I know I do, especially since she is moving, but I have a memory of her, a painting, a statue, a vast idea of how she is and how she's supposed to be which has been constructed from years of exposure to the woman, and do I really want ten minutes of the clicks and whirs of hospital machinery to take it all away? My biggest, most profound fear is that she won't remember who I am. To look at her and see nothing in her eyes, no affection, no compassion, no form of any emotion at all would devastate me and I don't think I'm willing to go there. She knows my mother, so the chances she'll recognize me are pretty good but I'm not sure if I want to risk it. I was her baby, her first grandchild, and I want to forever remian that way in her mind and mine. I am no longer who I used to be. The concrete, the for granted, it isn't there anymore. Those elements which shaped my childhood are sailing over the horizon with no intent of ever returning. This is something everyone must go through, yet I feel like no one understands. Did anyone else have a grandmother like mine? Did anyone else come to know a face so well, has anyone else ever had a person so intricately weaved into their life? What do you do the fabric begins to tear and you haven't got any patches? I do wish my grandmother would live to see me get married. I do intend on keeping a mental blueprint of the home she lived in for fifty years with me forever. So many holidays were spent in that tiny house with its table, antique couches, outdated television and old-fashioned radio. Nothing lasts forever, nothing at all. These I took of my grandmother last July 4th.

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