Personal Narrative: My Grandma's Funeral

Imagine, for a moment, a frail nine year old slumped in an antique wooden chair, surrounded by friends and family. At the front of the poorly lit room a cherry stained coffin sits with a limp corpse. Too immature to understand, the young boy sits motionless as he is engulfed with well wishes and hugs from complete strangers. “What's the big deal,” he wonders as he sneaks a piece of pepperoni from the tray that some great aunt brought. After a few days, the coffin is buried and the granite headstone is placed. The boy returns back to school like nothing ever happened. Almost nine years ago that little boy was me. My grandma’s funeral was the first instance of death I can remember. I knew what death was but had never experienced hearing the spine numbing words that a loved one has passed away. But it's not just her death that has

That all changed within an instant. As the years went by, she began to forget just small things here or there. Placing a pot of water to be boiled on the stove and forgetting to turn the stove on was a common occurrence. But everyone forgets to remember to do something every once and a while. That just comes with getting older, right? As much as I would love to say it was a case of forgetfulness, it wasn't. "Grandma has Alzheimer’s. She'll be okay for now, but we don't know how many good days she has left." The words of my mother were ringing in my ears as I pondered the question of what the heck Alzheimer’s was? I may have been seven at the time, and with little to no knowledge of the disease, I was stranded on an island without hope of rescue. Within a year, she went from a grandma who remembered everything, to someone who saw her own children as strangers. Two years after the dignosis, there I was, sitting in that dim, putrid smelling funeral home on one of the first warm days of