Member-only story
Dementia: An Empty Shell
The only way I can come to terms with this is to write about it
My Grandmother (My Dad is Italian so we call her Nonna) is a vibrant, stubborn, charismatic woman standing just under five feet tall. She emigrated to Canada with a single trunk of clothes and no money on a boat from rural Italy. She came to Canada alongside my Grandfather with no language, no education and no money. She was from a poor rural village in Italy and was born between the first and second world wars. In her time and in her town, girls were not educated past grade four and she could barely read and write in Italian, let alone in English.
My brother and I spent every single summer from when we were five until we were twelve at their house. The house had a TV with forty nine channels (only twenty nine of them worked) with no books, no video games, and no internet. My Nonno (Grandfather) and Nonna would drive us to school every day and pick us up every afternoon since our school was ten minutes from their house. In my Nonno’s 1982 Navy Blue Honda Accord we would have an assortment of fruit (usually a banana or some cut Strawberries), Dunkaroos or homemade cookies, and a cold juice-box waiting for us in the back seat. Both my parents worked full time and they were the people who looked after us from 7:30 am until school time, and from 3:30 pm until one of my…
