Fading Memories by Maria Lupi
I remember looking at my grandfather when I was younger and admiring how strong he was. Everyday he would get up at 4:00 AM and be at the workshop by 5:00 AM, where he would work non-stop until he couldn’t keep going because there wasn’t any more sunlight or there weren’t any more helpers. His whole life my grandfather was a hard worker, his parents were immigrants who started up by founding a small store in their small town in Cortés, Honduras; as well as having some trucks they would work with transporting material. My grandfather grew up knowing the transporting business, and later started his own. Not only did he transport material all over the country, but he also offered crane services to anyone close by. Nowadays he owns twenty-five trucks counting semi trucks and tow trucks.
I don’t have many memories of my grandfather from before I was a teenager, but one particular memory that I do have is every time he sat on the living room couch playing his guitar, and how we would gather around listening to him make up words for every song he played. I also remember the candy that he always carried in his left pocket. He’d always give them away and would get upset if you said no. Even though he was always working and didn’t spend that much time with us, the few memories I have of him show this very strong and loving person who would joke around and always make us laugh, and who would always be there anytime we needed help.
Around 2013, my grandfather was showing symptoms of Dementia; unfortunately we did not know what his behavior
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meant at the time. A couple of years later, in 2015, when he was seventy-three years old, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. For a long time I didn’t really understand what this meant. I knew my grandfather was sick, but I never thought I’d have to watch him fade away. After his diagnosis my grandfather kept working every day until June 2020 when he got sick with Covid and was forced to stop. Tere are many stages to Alzheimer’s disease, and due to Covid my grandpa skipped some of them. Tis might seem like a good thing up to a certain point, as some stages include aggressive outbursts, paranoia, and delusion. However, this also means that his Alzheimer’s progressed even quicker than it was supposed to, making his condition worse than it should be by now.
My grandfather had a nickname for me when I was a little girl, “chepita,” which for most of my life he reminded me how much I hated that nickname, and how much he loved using it because of how annoyed I would get when he did. As his memories slipped away, he would always tell me how I looked so much like my mom, and how we reminded him of his mother; “as beautiful as my mama” he would say. Now he looks at me with such confusion in his eyes. He has forgotten that little girl he used to mock all the time and give the candy he was always carrying in his pocket.
By 2021, he could no longer remember my name and would often confuse me with different people. I remember going to visit him one time, and seeing him with a big smile on his face, as I got close to him the first thing he said was “who are you?” Of course by now I was used to this question. My grandma would often step in and say “It’s Maria, Juana’s daughter,”and
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