My Ass Hurts
I'm riding the LIRR into the city. When the conductor comes by to check my pass, it's gone, seeming to have disappeared from my badge holder. I frantically begin to rifle through my pockets and handbag. The conductor says he sees me on the train every day and he knows I'm good for it. That's a small relief at least, as I'd be out $12 for the one-way ticket to Manhattan if he didn't vouch for me. But it's only February 3rd! I have an entire month of commuting left to do. I am completely fucked, I think, remembering that I barely had the $209 to spend on the monthly pass in the first place. Where the hell am I going to get another $200?! I am sick to my stomach. Did someone actually steal it out of the badge holder that I constantly wear around my neck, Monday to Friday, 9 AM to 7 PM? When I pulled out my Metrocard for the subway, did I drop it? Did Monkey or Ray take it for some reason?
Then I remember that yesterday I took it out to put in the scanner at work so I could get the MTA logo off the front. The very idea of senility scares the shit out of me.
My grandfather on my mother's side always seemed ancient, ever since I was a kid. He was always exceptionally friendly as well, paying special attention to my female friends who came over when he was visiting us in California. It turns out he was quite the ladies man, especially if the lady was between the ages of 2 and 12, or even better, a relative of his.
When I was in my early 20's, my sister told me how he had fucked her in the shed behind his house when she was 2 or 3. A few years later, my uncle Mark, who was only a few years older than me burned down that shed. Perhaps he too was a victim of his father's peculiar tastes?
Grandpa was diagnosed with Altzheimer's disease when I was still in my teens. His already poor social skills seemed to be the first thing to go. He would sit at a Thanksgiving table and describe the giant ball of earwax his doctor has removed from his ear the previous week. My grandmother would sit beside him barking at him to keep quiet. He ignored her and continued to tell us how much better his hearing was since the removal of the earwax.
His condition steadily worsened over the next 15 years. My aunt Bonnie built a seperate apartment onto her house so he and Grandma Leia could move in. She took care of them, even though she has MS and her own health was declining.
In the early 90's, Grandpa no longer recognized anyone around him. He thought it was still 1952 and that he was still a dairy farmer in Wisconsin. He would ask where his wife was, meaning his first wife, my mother's mom, who had died over 30 years before. He was a handful, a hindrance to his wife, daughter and friends, but still they cared for him themselves. Then, on a senior church bus trip, he began announcing loudly, over and over, "My ass hurts!" He had always been very religious, and never cursed in his life. He had worked very hard to keep up the appearance of a holy pious man of God. Shortly after this, he was put in a home.
Now completely senile, he had lost the thing in him that had kept his devious behavior hidden all those years. He groped a nurse here and there. When my mother came to visit him he put the moves on her, forgetting completely who she was. "Where did that large girl go?" He asked when she had left. When a local group of volunteer do-gooders brought cats and dogs to the home to visit the poor old lonely people who lived there, he tried to strangle a puppy they had placed on his lap. The nurse next to him had to fight him to pry his steel-like grip from around the dog's throat. Was he always such a bad person, and the Altzheimer's had simply let that be shown? Or was the disease amplifying every sinister urge he had now?
When he died in 1995, I was in California and didn't attend his funeral. My sister went, although she was hardly sad to see him dead. That day became a marker of time in our lives, referred to ever after as "funeral day", as though it was some sort of festive holiday or event that we fondly remembered.
He was never caught, never confronted and never punished for his misdeeds in his lifetime. Out of the 6 children and 30+ grandchildren he had, who knows how many suffered because of his proclivities? Was he ever remorseful for the things he had done? I look back on the bizarre painful life that was my sister's, a life filled with drug dependency and sexual abuse and I can't help but wonder how differently it might have turned out, had he not taken advantage of her that summer.
Perhaps senility can be induced in a person by a life spent doing evil. Maybe we can only accept our own cruelty up to a certain point, and then our conscience begins to rub itself out, until we are finally freed from the responsibility of our actions. I'd like to believe that at some point my grandfather felt guilt or remorse for the things he'd done to the people he supposedly loved, but that is probably due to the fact that I can't accept the alternative, that he did what he did and he was okay with it all.