Riverview

The third floor is where they would place their healthiest residents, and that was where my grand-mother, my mother’s mother, lived when she was first checked in for Alzheimer’s. I don’t have an exact, physical memory from this stage, although I possess something of a foggy visual. It could be real, but I couldn’t tell you for certain. I was only five or six at the

time.

In a collage of images, I can remember the elevator’s interior showing only steel, its silver pigment muddied. Disfigured like a reflection in waking water—I couldn’t fully see myself. I take this moment of ascension to be the intersection of our mental states, for I was just beginning to rise as my grandmother was descending and crossing through the levels of the Riverview Estates.

Before it was a nursing home, it was a Victorian manor. The entryway was dreary and poorly lit, encompassed with dark wood to dramatize the effect. A low-voltage chandelier hung in the slim passageway to where the chapel resides. To the left of the entrance

was an office with a sliding window and a clipboard to sign in, and farther down was the common area, with its high ceiling, old couches, and upright piano.

To get to the elevator, there was a hallway lined with plaques to honor donors and the deceased. Each iron plaque was designed as a leaf to a branch of a tree, the names swooping down. At the end of the hallway is where the elevator was, and when it opened, it felt just as dark as the wood of the entrance. This then took us to the third floor.

I remember the halls on this floor to be particularly dim, the ceiling tiles made of spotted cardboard, with an odd number of lights being out. The walls were painted brown, just as they were throughout the entire building, and somewhere, down to the left of the

elevator, was her room. It was rather large, like a hotel suite, with her view facing neighboring homes. For two years, she was able to live on her own like this, but then she was moved closer to the ground, onto the first floor. From age eight onward, this is where we spent most of our time together.

The room was tinier, but it had more warmth to it too—for parts of her were still there. She still had her own space, but she needed more assistance. She could still speak, but with limited words. She could still walk, but with a stroller to keep balance.

Her TV often had reruns of old sitcoms like M.A.S.H, and my sister and I would play Parcheesi as my Mom helped organize the room. Out of her window was a scene of the Delaware River and the oak trees that followed it, but from the other side of the door was a nursing unit. The only image I can see is of a blurred, single hung window encompassing its

entrance, and a blinding white from inside.

Despite her moving around the facility, there was a certain consistency in the walks we would take along the Delaware. Most of the time, I would be running about with the toys I had and the imaginative stories that I was spinning up to keep myself entertained. She would watch from a wheelchair as I enacted my characters, silent and invisible to the rest of the world, yet ever present to me in the fact that she existed. She herself was beginning to forget what the world was like. To me, it seemed to be getting larger every day, for I was finding that it never stopped spinning, that people never stopped living until they passed into heaven—so I kept running. I would go some distance down, the green Tacony–Palmyra Bridge getting closer in sight, but before I could even think of reaching it, my mother figured that we had gone far enough, so we took my grandmother back home. But this home was no representation of who she was in life.

I was told that she was a strong, stubborn, and independent person. She was exceptionally gorgeous, with straight, silky hair that was dark yet reflective, like wet basalt in the sun. In many ways, she shared those same traits as a person.

My Mom and uncle were both artificially inseminated due to her husband having caught the mumps when he was younger. I have always gotten the sense that my Mom never considered him her real father, and I gathered that it was because he never thought her to be his real daughter.

One day, on our way back from a beach trip, I began asking my Mom about him and his treatment. She said he was an alcoholic, that he could be violent. I then asked if he hit Grandma, and she told me he would sometimes slap her. I continued to ask questions, but eventually, she yelled at me to knock it off, saying that she didn’t want to talk about it any further. I never pushed the topic again.

My grandmother then divorced that man in the 70s or 80s—relinquishing his support. She often left my Mom and uncle home alone, working to pay the bills, and was further left unsupported by any man, although she didn’t seem to need it.

Funny enough, she was also an avid supporter of Ronald Reagan, putting her faith in the man and mounting a letter sent by his campaign to thank her for her support. It was the same one sent to all of the volunteers, but it was still special enough for her to memorialize. And while I detest the origin figure of our demise, I can’t help but think that she wouldn’t have given a damn what I thought about Reagan. Thinking of her voice, saying that she doesn’t, makes me smile, even though I do not know the complete sound of it.

It wasn’t until the late 90s and early 2000s that she started to develop behaviors of someone with dementia or Alzheimer’s (it has always been my understanding that they go hand-in-hand, or that they maybe the same).

When my Dad discussed my Mom’s and his upcoming wedding, my grandmother seemed dismissive or rather distracted. One night, when she was tasked with looking after my cousin, she was found watching the TV while he cried from his crib. Soon after, there was the oven being left on, and the details of a fender bender she could not muster. When all of

this happened, this was when my mother knew.

Then, somewhere in this time period, my grandmother no longer liked her hair color, and dyed it red. Somewhere in this time period, she lost sight of herself.

Flash forward to my being of age ten: she could no longer walk or speak, and she had been committed to the bleakness of the 24-hour nursing sector on the first floor; the side across from where she came.

Here, I remember the white: the floors, the doctors’ clothes, the machines, the black-and-white movies they watched. The lights themselves. The curtain of the room she had to share. Everything I see is this, except for the darkness that came from the lack of open windows and open air, and the walls which were a darker brown.

Whenever we would come and visit, my Mom would greet her in a sweet voice, and she would give us a smile that was worth the world to see. I always wondered whether she knew at this point who we were. I wish to believe that she did—but I’ll never know. All

that I may know was that she was, possibly, in some sort of thoughtless, blissful state, and that maybe she was just happy to have company, to simply exist. To my conscience, this reveals something deeper in terms of the core of her illness: that it was maybe not so bad

towards the end, even if its very existence was putrid.

And I know that I have written extensively about my later memories of her, but there is a first memory.

I was very tiny, maybe three or four years old, and the last dog she owned was large in comparison to me. I remember sitting on her couch, wary of the beast. There was also the cat, Mean Tiggy, but I did not know him to be mean. I do not doubt that he wasn’t— I just never saw his behavior. (I should mention that Nice Tiggy had already passed by then.)

The felt couch that I sit on is just beside the door. My sister and I sit here, comfortable with watching my grandma stroll about, my Mom and Dad preparing dinner. Eventually, she stops this and takes us off the couch, putting a leash on the animal, and we all go on a walk.

There are branches hanging down, green lawns wet from whatever moisture was in the air. Everything is high above me as I trail behind, looking up to her velvet hair. Then, I remember her waiting, taking my hand, and walking with me down the avenue.

It is a short memory, but it must mean something that it is there. It is one of my first, and it is the only one where she was not within Riverview.

When she died, I came to think of it more often. I come to think about it now because it is the only moment where I can see her in her most complete state, where I can feel that she was a full person with nothing taken from her. But potentially, it is only there for the fact that the halls that are close to death do not exist.

In the end, her passing came the day after my sister’s fourteenth birthday. Her immune system had gone in the days prior, and she somehow caught shingles. Thereafter, I thought that shingles, which is a disease originating from the same virus as chickenpox, was a deadly diagnosis, an immediate death sentence—until I came to find out that she only died because of the strength she no longer had.

My Mom and uncle drove up one last time to organize and take some of her belongings, to say their goodbyes to their mother, and then came back home. She had turned eighty less than two months prior.

After her passing, she was moved back to Bristol, Rhode Island, where she once grew up, and where I now attend school. I often go there to talk with her as I cut weeds from around her name.

She lies next to a rhododendron, magnanimous above me, as her mother and father are beside her. She is now made of something I cannot ascertain, for I am a human on Earth, in the American town where she was raised. I came here in the belief that I was possibly meant to on her behalf, to see her and be closer to her—but there is still a level between us. She is in a place I cannot reach, but I imagine it to be filled with white light, and I imagine that she no longer has red hair. I imagine her to be young, the age at which she had my mother, and that we are equal in our mental states. But I know that it is now I who is descending through the levels, and that she is in a place I will never be able to reach but through these sentences and words. She is in a place that one day I will go to, but for now—I am in Riverview, the last place before heaven is found.

B. F. Harvey

Bristol RI, USA

B. F. Harvey is a graduating senior who is majoring in both creative-writing and history. He

was born in Pennsylvania and raised in New Jersey. He began writing at the age of thirteen. He is currently writing his history thesis on Fyodor Dostoevesky, works as a co-managing editor for Mount Hope’s Literary Magazine, and hopes to soon be published elsewhere.