The Day That Today Was
By Rianna Pauline Starheim
Photographs by Rosem Morton
When I was a child, my grandmother and I made terrariums. Each of us carrying a glass orb container, we walked up the steep, swampy pasture in front of her house. In the woods near the top of the hill, the pale light touched the forest floor like a cathedral. We sat on rocks and gathered moss, stones, dirt, leaves, snails, and small plants. We arranged everything into its own miniature world in the glass containers, added a lid with holes so the snails could breathe, and put the terrariums in the kitchen window. In my memory, the glass orb was larger than a soccer ball, but when I moved in with Grandma and found it decades later, I realized it was only half that size.
Grandma kept a daily diary her entire adult life, published two memoirs, and labeled items that had historical significance around the house. She was afraid of losing her memories. After a stroke wiped most of them away, including any memory of me, her mind resurfaced as it had been 85 years prior, taking her back to her childhood. She was suddenly physically and emotionally dependent as she had not been since then. I moved in to be her caregiver. The day I arrived, I peeked in on her sleeping in the music room, where we’d moved her bed to be downstairs and near the piano. An oil portrait of her father, Ralph Rose, hung above her as she slept, a daisy tucked into his buttonhole. He was a farmer, painter, ornithologist, and master gardener who had five children, all with flaming red hair. Before Grandma’s stroke, she kept hers dyed in the bold shade of her youth, sometimes coming home from the beauty parlor with surprising hues of red and orange. She always had a perm. After the stroke, her hair grew out white, straight, soft, and beautiful, although she remained convinced it was red and curly.
Rianna holds her grandmother, Ruth, before bed.
I watched her sleep peacefully, imagining her brain doing its best to heal. After three decades absorbed in my own life and mind, I felt suddenly like a new single mom. Only, I knew I would outlive my child and she wouldn’t know who I was when she woke up. Grandma could walk with a walker, was mostly pain-free, and—unlike many who struggle with memory and disability as they age—maintained a beautiful life outlook and soul. “I am at a nursing home now and liking it,” she wrote in a shaky letter to a friend, even though she had lived in this house nearly 75 years. “I wonder what it’s going to do today,” she repeated and repeated over coffee in the kitchen, looking outside. Every night she rang an old cowbell on her nightstand, sometimes eight times, confused and trying to get out of bed. I helped her to the bathroom and then sat to wait on a wooden stool her father had built for her when she was a child.
For decades before becoming Grandma’s caregiver, I had struggled with deep depression born largely of living in the past. Grandma’s post-stroke brain was only capable of living in the present; awareness in each moment was the closest she had to memory. It was good practice for me. I hugged her at least ten times a day and gave nightly foot massages, which made her melt, which melted me. One morning, 3 a.m., or maybe it was 3:30, or 4, or 5, I started asking, “Want to have a dance party?” as I helped her out of the bathroom and back to bed. I taught her to swallow Tylenol instead of putting it on the place that hurts and stopped correcting her when she insisted that her hair was red. Over time, I didn’t mind explaining how to brush her teeth twice a day. I reassured her often—because, of course, a blank memory is a catalyst for fear—and sought her delight. She opened the same gift many times over, each time feeling special and surprised. We danced to 1940s music in the kitchen, my throat tightening as I held her frail, giggling body close and we swayed. One night, I sat next to her faded recliner and we ate all of the chocolate chips out of the jar, talking through the things we thought we might not see eye to eye on. In the end, we couldn’t find any.
Rianna and Ruth sing grace before dinner.
Grandma was a trained musician and career kindergarten teacher. Every night, I played a small piano concert for her from her mother’s early-century sheet music—“In the Garden” and other hymns, “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” from her large collection of early childhood songs, and reams of other sheet music. Occasionally, I tried to play “Clair de Lune” or Albert Jay Malotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer,” a difficult arrangement that Grandma and I would practice often when I visited before her stroke and had performed together several times at church, she on piano, me singing. I had wanted to be a musician growing up, but music had barely been part of my life for years. Playing piano daily, especially for a woman who had nurtured my love of music, sparked healing and emotion that seemed to physically wash through my brain. While I played these nighttime concerts, Grandma sat on her bed and put on her pajamas, got dressed again, put on pajamas, got dressed, focused and humming along. She didn’t know which direction she was going, so just kept going. One night, I glanced behind me to check on her, then jumped up. She was in a fit of giggles, tangled in her nightgown, cheeks flushed pink and wispy hair white. “For the life of me,” she said, beside herself with laughter, “I cannot figure this out.”
Summer was warm, heavy air and nature at its kindest: full, generous, and green. Every day, I pushed Grandma’s wheelchair slowly down the road, past cow pastures and the church where she’d been pianist for more than half a century and where I now play for funerals, holiday services, and special events. Sometimes, we visited a local patch of lucky clovers or stopped to gather wild apples, raspberries, and blackberries along the road. When we got to the bridge, I parked her wheelchair and stretched out flat on the guardrail, my head near her lap, gazing at the sky. “Listen to the music,” Grandma would say about the water, and so we did. We talked for hundreds of hours there that summer: long, meandering conversations about the beautiful quality of light through the leaves, whether I would ask my boyfriend to marry me, how impressed her disapproving mother had been when Grandma played “Clair de Lune.” We talked about the nature of memory and the complicated, slow healing of the mind. “Memory is a great thing,” Grandma would repeat, “if you have it.” She’d laugh incredulously when I asked, “How would it feel to fall in love with your own brain?” It was a question along with many others that I had been trying to discover for myself. We each had our repetitions.
Rianna reads old letters from Ruth during dinner to see if it helps her regain memories.
Grandma continued to be exceedingly kind to friends, family, and strangers, as she always had been, but was often impatient and cruel to herself—a trait that frustrated me so much I grew determined to eradicate it in both of us. “Can you say something nice about yourself?” I asked her thousands of times. After a long pause of thinking, she would reply, “I like my hair.” Together, daily, we repeated mantras of kind and gentle statements. I told Grandma many things I had never articulated before. Lacking memory, Grandma was a fresh audience every time and a trustworthy keeper of secrets. She would have come to know me better than anyone if she could remember. Instead, I came to know myself. As Grandma left her self—sleeping many hours a day, eating daintily (except chocolate), and unable to access most memories—I came into greater fullness of my own self. Over the course of the summer, something I thought I knew to be impossible happened: two decades of unrelenting depression melted away. In the years since my grandfather had died, particularly right before her stroke, Grandma had mentioned experiencing depression and loneliness. We’d never spoken of it deeply and I don’t think she was aware of my own parallel emotional suffering. That summer, I wondered if despite her confusion, she might actually be happier than she’d been since my grandfather’s death.
During our long conversations, I did most of the talking. I wished I could ask Grandma questions about her life and my ancestors: women who painted the hundreds of flowered dishes in the dining room, men who constructed the property’s furniture and barns. Grandma had been interested in genealogy since I was born, but I had not been good at listening. Between Grandma, her father, and myself, we have a collection of more than 200 diaries, spanning 1902 to date. Each day, we read the entry of her father one hundred years back, pressing a flower or lucky clover we’d found that day on the page. Grandma stitched more than 50 quilts before she lost her vision and eventually became legally blind. I hung many of these on the walls around us and they covered every bed. Going to sleep each night, often exhausted by repetition and caregiving, I felt taken care of by a past version of my grandmother. Which, of course, I always am.
All summer we sat on the patio, lined by Grandma’s prized rose garden that she no longer remembered, but was still beautiful. Two pairs of resident hummingbirds flew around each other and through the tomato vines. I put bouquets of miniature wildflowers we had picked in a champagne glass centerpiece. “Tomorrow isn’t going to be the day that today was,” Grandma said one day, looking at the sky. It had been cloudy and dark, the mountain beyond the cornfield blurred by haze, but the sky hadn’t yet fallen. That came later. She sat up straight. “I’m trying to figure out how I can get from this chair to that chair gracefully,” she said. “Just to prove that I could.” She waited for me to argue, then stood, turned, and sat in the second chair. “Didn’t think I could, did you?” she said.
Rianna plays the piano with Ruth, who regained the ability to remember some musical pieces.
Rianna hugs Ruth after they danced together to Forties music.
