1.  Homecoming 

On the day I arrived home from the hospital with my daughter, I went straight to my grandfather’s bedroom. I waddled through the door, supporting myself with its wooden frames towards the nearest chair in the room; my body still reeled with pain from the episiotomy. He was sleeping but he stirred when I approached his bed and looked up at me. I remember telling him to meet his first great-granddaughter. I didn’t expect a response because the dementia had reached the point where his speech was now filled with incomprehensible ramblings and random words. However, on that Friday afternoon, I had gotten a smile. It lit his whole face, even his eyes seemed to sparkle with life. It reminded me of how he used to light up whenever he talked about his hometown, Kimberley, and chasing chickens in the township with his siblings. The smile carried a lot, saying what he couldn’t articulate. He had welcomed her home.

2. The End Before The End

We lost my grandfather when his dementia sneaked into our lives. It was his first death. It made him forget our names, our faces and, sometimes, his self, unaware of his own name. He was living in his own world, calling us by various names that shifted with the days. I reckon, in that final decade as the dementia worsened, he had also felt alien in his own home, in his own body. Thus, when he finally exchanged kisses with death, it hurt more than I imagined it would. I was not only crying for him leaving us, but for the ten years where we lived with him as a stranger.

3. The Day: Part I

I am told that when I was about five days old, I started crying hysterically. I am my mother’s first child, and she had tried everything she knew to calm me: rocking, feeding, and singing. Nothing worked. My grandmother, a retired nurse, had also tried her own set of tricks but despite the huffing and puffing, she failed.