Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Living. Dead. Dead.

Living. Almost. Dead.

My grandmother is going through the photographs again. A fan of black-and-whites sprouts from the end of a vein-rivered hand. The hand is decorated with one enormous orange jellybean set in silver housing a graveyard of tiny bugs. My grandmother flicks her wrist in the direction of a group of black-and-white people raising their glasses to 1946. The ends of her fingers are pink pearl.

Dead, she says. Dead. Dead. Dead.

My grandmother has diagnosed herself with dementia. We are arguing about the soundness of such a pronouncement. She pulls a crumpled piece of newsprint from her pocket and shakes it at me between sips of coffee: "Dementia Commonly Underdiagnosed." My grandmother instructs me to skip the introduction and go straight to the list of symptoms at the end: Decrease in short-term memory; and further down, Lack of interest in shopping, which she points out with glee.

My grandmother’s left arm zigzags in the air between her body and the kitchen table. She broke it last winter when she fell. Two months later, when the cast was split open, the arm came out withered and bent. The skin is pale and bumpy and, according to my grandmother, looks like boiled chicken. I have set the table with two plates, two knives and two forks. I have brought rolls for us to eat, and salad and chicken. My grandmother says she isn’t hungry. She blames her lack of appetite on the dementia. I slice the meat on my grandmother’s plate into small chewable pieces, while she sits and examines her arm.

On the radio there is a man telling a woman about an anonymous gravesite he has found out in the country. The grave is said to date back to the war. The man on the radio says he can identify who died there, even though all there is left is a small jumble of bones.

My grandmother says that her own bones have forgotten if they go up or down anymore. She says the weight of them keeps her from getting up in the morning. The social worker has to pull her out of bed. The bones only want to lie down now. Some days, the bones forget they are still alive...