Their Last Conversation?

My father-in-law, Bob, and his cousin, Aunt Trudy, are the children of first generation immigrants. Their parents came to America on a boat from Germany in the late 19th century and both grew up speaking German as a first language. They both claim to not remember German at all. English was the language of America it was demanded that they speak it. So they did.

Trudy remembers that her aunt, Bob's mother, was given a fresh tomato by somebody working on the boat. She was perplexed by this gift since she had never seen a tomato in her life. So, she threw it at him - thinking it a toy or a piece of a game.

Bob and Trudy were raised as siblings, which was common in those days of the Depression, when families saved money by living together and getting on each other's nerves. She had to take care of him but didn't mind too much. She put him in the buggy and volunteered to go the market, a daily task in those days of iceboxes and milk deliveries. While she was praised as being 'such a good girl' and taking care of the baby, she had an ulterior motive. The baby buggy could hold the groceries and she wouldn't have to carry the heavy bags back to the house. This girl was smart. The problem, according to her impatient father, was that she was a girl.

Aunt Trudy turned 100 on her last birthday. Bob had turned 87 a few weeks earlier. They had a habit of speaking to each other on the phone about once a week, talking about the same old things since nothing exciting happens in your house when you rarely leave it.

It has been apparent for a few years that Aunt Trudy is losing her memory and she finally allowed for live-in companions to keep her safe from heaters, matches, and stoves that won't turn off.

We thought Bob's old age meant a lot of crankiness. It has become shockingly apparent to us that it is much more than that. He is losing his mind in bits and pieces, coherent and mindful one minute and wandering the house and asking for his long-dead parents the next. It is worse at sundown, when he is constantly adjusting the heater, looking for bills that have already been paid, fixating on his calendar of names and dates, and trying to take out empty trash cans at 4:00 in the morning.

Aunt Trudy was a brilliant money manager who worked for the County of Los Angeles. She supervised 80 people and had the eyes of a hawk. She travelled extensively and could carry on a conversation with anybody about just about anything. The first time Aunt Trudy met my mother, they talked for 2 hours about shared memories of living in Hollywood - landmarks, stores, churches, and the famous people they saw. This they did while eating Chinese food at a South Pasadena eatery, with me wedged between them, my eyes going back and forth in this conversational tennis match.

Bob was a supervisor at Western Electric, the company he went to work for before he was drafted in World War II. At the end of the war, they calculated his back pay, gave him a raise, and welcomed him home. He retired after 42 years, disgusted by the lack of work ethic shown by younger, newer employees.

So I think about Aunt Trudy and Bob and I wonder about their weekly phone conversations. When was the last time they had a decent, coherent conversation? Was there a particular date in which all things were normal and then they weren't? When tangled memories meet, where do they overlap? Is there comfort in that? Bob would complain to me that Trudy was "losing it" one minute but brush her lapses off as "an act to get attention" the next.

They've known each other for 87 years, the one and only constant in each other's lives. She lived her first 13 years on the planet without him and then he was there and she reveled in the fact that his little strawberry-blond head fit "right there" in the crook of her shoulder. He was a bright spot in the dreary upbringing and heavy workload expected by immigrant parents.

At which point will that constant be lost? Where do those fleeting, treasured memories go? Can they be held onto for dear life? What happens when one of them forgets? What kind of heartbreak is that?

I wonder these things. I wonder about the cruelties of dementia and the stealing of somebody's mind.

I wonder about their last conversation.