Well, as anyone who follows me on Facebook or Twitter knows, Thanksgiving night I received some rather bad news. My grandfather has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. We had our suspicions that he had it for a while now, there were the signs. The forgetfulness. The telling the same stories over and over. The confusion. But, being told that he was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on a cruise when we called Thanksgiving night? Yeah, that was pretty much a dead giveaway. The phone call to my aunt confirmed it. What's sad is how many years we went without speaking to each other for a while.
See, after my dad died, there were things said from both sides that were hurtful. He had been told some things that were incorrect about us, and unfortunately, he believed them. I fired back, and he didn't speak to me for nearly 8 years. Almost a whole decade.
We would send him Christmas cards and gifts, never expecting any back, and never receiving any back, that wasn't the point. We didn't care about that. What we cared about was the fact that he wasn't sending ours back to us. When A.J. was born, I had hoped to hear something from him. Anything. We heard nothing. From my aunt and great aunt we did, sure. But, not from him.
Finally, one day, I asked my aunt to put him on the phone. We talked. And talked some more. We drove up when A.J. was three. We met. We talked. We hugged. He cried. I told him with a smile to knock it off. We can't change the past, we can only learn and move on. We then made an annual trip up to see him with A.J. and later, of course, Chris.
He loves his great-grandsons. They love him. And, this is what's going to make it hard. The next time we go up, we have no idea what his mental state will be like. He may fine, he may not. But, you know what? Who gives a shit? He's my grandfather, their great-grandfather, and dammit, we love him no matter what. We'll get through this. We're LaPraths. It's what we do. We're too stubborn to know any better.
