Alzheimer's Disease

Like most immigrants, I worked in minimum wage jobs until I found the job I went to university for. I worked in various hotels as a cleaner. They were called chamber maids in Victorian England because they cleaned bedrooms (chambers). They also emptied chamber pots filled at night, by the aristocracy.

One day, in one hotel, a family checked out. The elderly guest asked me if I had seen his jacket. We checked everywhere. The hotel had blue recycling bins in rooms. That is where I found it. The guest had insisted that he packed it. Only, it was in a bin, not his bag.

Grandparents forget. Experts call it dementia or Alzheimer’s Disease. I’ve read articles where families put elderly parents in a home for safety or medical reasons. I don’t know how they manage without the hustle and bustle of children and the general traffic in a home. My grandfather had dementia.

There was a change in his life. My grandmother was tired of city life of ‘doing nothing’ so, my grandparents got a piece of land out of town. They started with one room. My uncle, the first-born son kept adding rooms until it looked like a house and had something I called wings: where my uncles slept, grandparents’ wing, the kitchen and kids’ bedrooms. Grandfather was retired by then and had high octane dementia.

He scolded us (his grandchildren) a lot. He hid food from us and forgot his hiding places. He would ask our uncles and grandma why we were there and sometimes told us to go back to the city, to our parents. Grandmother put her foot down when it came to her grandchildren. We laughed at grandfather, because kids can be cruel.

It was only when I moved abroad for college, that I read of senior citizens found wandering about, because they couldn’t remember the home address. My grandfather was one of the lucky ones, because I don’t remember him getting lost and he liked dressing up in suit and tie and going to the city. Rest in peace (RIP), my mother's father.

Nonqaba waka Msimang

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