Lost in the frame of a summer day...

This weekend my family celebrated my grandmother's 88th birthday. We celebrated it, but I'm not so sure that she did. I'm not sure if medical science has assigned a name to her condition - because I know it isn't Alzheimer's that she has (or that's what I'm told), but there is something there. In another time they just would have called it "old age."

In a sense I've gotten used to this, it's not like the first time - I remember that. I don't know how many have had the experience of a relative you've known all your life staring at you like a stranger, but it's an experience of lostness. By that I mean you are the one that feels lost - that you have been cut away from your own family, from your own past.

We tend to think of all the people around us, our family, our friends as this great web, or chain, or some form of connectness. And it is, I suppose. But we are also all alone, what keeps those bonds? Are we only a community so long as we exist in the mind of the other? What happens when that awareness is all one-sided?

It's all too much to contemplate on a summer day in the sun, so I didn't, but I'm left with these same thoughts. And I wonder what my grandmother saw, what she's now. All the voices, shapes, and colours of the day moving over the contours of nearly nine decades of memory and imagination. How much of that memory endures? What parts of it are faded and threadbare?

I guess all I can do is wonder, as I did while watching my grandmother - the calm centre of four generations all around the lawn of a farmhouse.