A Five-Year-Old
Teaches a
Lesson in Grace
On the night the author loses patience
with her mother and her dementia,
a granddaughter’s love unites them all
by Leslie Kendall Dye
from the new york timesI
t’s eight o’clock on a cold spring
night. Our apartment has been hit
by a cyclone—the handiwork of a
young, energetic child. Every bit of
furniture is draped with paper chains,
scissors and Scotch tape, modeling
clay, piles of acorns, and party favors.
I’m so tired tonight. I’ve been on
crutches for seven weeks, recovering
from hip surgery, and I’m trying fruit-
lessly to clean up.LIFE WELL LIVED
The phone rings—for the sixth time
in less than an hour. We know who it is.
When my mother was 68, a
hemorrhagic stroke claimed her
brain, but not her life. She awoke
from a coma severely damaged; the
bleed instantly razed the landscape
of her mind. Dementia soon built
a Gothic fun house of distortions
where coherent architecture had once
stood. She has been manacled inside24 march 2019