Forgetting

My grandmother’s decline started long before the beginning of the end.

It started long before she began repeating the same questions over and over, in thirty-second intervals. A long time before she tried to leave the house at night to go find her long-deceased mother in town. It started long before she thought she’d make coffee for the guests of her childhood boarding house that had been torn down some 50 years earlier.

And then it ended. It ended with me seeing death for the first time.