Alzheimer’s: Caught Between Two Worlds
Vairea Houston

I watched as the perfect pink rose I set on my grandmother’s casket was lowered into the ground. Beautiful and serene like her, that rose would remain within the ground. I don’t think you can register that someone you love has passed until it’s staring you in the face. I then began to sob on the shoulder of my Uncle, who put his arm around me in comfort. But there is no comfort in death, so I accepted his shoulder to shield me from my own grief. My estranged family all stood in a half moon around the burial plot while the hearse driver stayed unusually close behind, watching. We all stood about five feet from each other, uncomfortable. Five days after her death, Oma (Dutch for grandmother) was here in Bainbridge Island, being buried in the plot her friend had given her. The day was bright but a breeze kept me wrapping a shawl around my arms, it seemed understandable that the day would keep its chill. It had hit me that I would never hear her tell a story again, or hold her hand as we wheeled her around when the sun came out to play. I hoped that she saw me from up above, and recognized me one last time.
Katrina Rutunuwu was born January 5th 1929 in Sumatra, Indonesia to her Indonesian parents, Martinez and Katerina Rutunuwu. She was one of fourteen children. Her father was in the Dutch army so they often moved around throughout what was then the Dutch East Indies. After Katrina was born they moved from Sumatra to Jakarta.One of her earliest memories is her family’s trip to her grandparent’s farm in Sulawesi when she was eight years old. She recalls her grandparents waking her up at 5 am to go to their fields for food. An old wagon pulled them along through the fields, led by a Caribou. You can hear the fondness of Oma’s memory as she describes the excitement all her siblings felt when told they would be traveling in a wagon for the first time. She was told to wash up in the stream before they ate. She washed her face in a cold, clear stream that ran from the mountains down through their property. It was then that Oma ate her first pineapple on that field in Sulawesi. “It was so sweet and delicious,” she said. It was five days of firsts for the children visiting their grandparents. They spent nights in a tree house while her grandma would build fires down below them to keep the wild boars from eating their crops. In the morning they would wake up to fresh rice from the fields, it was sweet and green. Her grandparents would make bbq corn, sugar cane for dessert, and make a drink out of a nearby tree that produced sweet and sour liquid. It was stories like this that my grandma would tell me when I was little and they were always so bright and vivid like you were watching them through a magnifying glass.
On December 12th, 2008 Oma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It was then that we saw her change. She began to tell the same stories repeatedly, from forgetting where she put her jewelry, to forgetting where she was. She couldn’t live on her own anymore, so she moved from her apartment in Bainbridge Island to Crista Senior Living in Silverdale, Washington. It was a small distance from Bainbridge Island but a huge difference in her lifestyle. She was limited to the amount of things she could bring with her, she wasn’t allowed jewelry, had only a few pairs of clothes, and only a few pictures on her side of the room. She had to live with other ladies and had strict breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours to adhere to. Trips anywhere had to be done with family or on designated days with other seniors. There were days we picked her up that begged us not to take her back, so she would stay over and my mom would pamper her. It was days like those that were painful to see. I’d watch my mom walk Oma to her room and kiss her goodbye, and I saw Oma’s fear of being alone. It reminded me of when my mom would leave me in kindergarten. For the first couple week I was so confused, why did I have to be around all these strangers? My mom felt so guilty leaving her therefor she had switched from being the daughter to being the mother.
I saw her Alzheimer’s progressively advance during her stay at Crista. She had a harder time distinguishing our names, accused her family members of stealing her things, and felt threatened by her neighbors, and old friends. She began roaming the hallways at night and forgetting where she was. She went beyond the services of a senior living home and needed to be in assisted living to be completely taken care of. My mom and Uncle Rio found Crista Shores Assisted Living in Edmonds, Washington. This, where Oma spent over five years of her life, are the most vivid in my memory. The entrance gives off a warm embracing feeling that I remember mostly during the first winter she lived there. A fireplace greets you, surrounded by leather sofas, and tables offering snacks and refreshments. You receive a name tag that sticks onto your clothing for at least thirty minutes of your stay. They divide up the hallways by naming the wings after different types of trees. Oma was located in Dogwood, and all separate wings were locked with passcodes so seniors wouldn’t get lost. Although the entrance gives off an inviting feeling for guests, the rooms gave me the chills. They were all covered in white blank walls, hospital looking beds that were easily adjusted and very sparse decorations. Outside each room was a plaque describing the person living there, how old they were, and where they called home. She called herself Cathy here in America and that’s what the sign read. At the entrance to Dogwood, a sign-in book held the signatures of those that visited and the day they came. In the first few months her only visitors had been me, Leilani (my mother), Uncle Rio, and his wife Rita. Oma’s stages of Alzheimer’s had taken over aggressively in those months and it was unfortunate that the rest of our family weren’t here to see it. Other seniors were at different stages, some stages were indistinguishable by the naked eye. I saw some wander the hallways in curiosity and other glued to their beds or wheelchairs. Oma began using a wheelchair during her stay at the first living home because of the bunions that made it too painful to walk.
Being around someone with Alzheimer’s means handling with their mood swings and not looking for their recognition for your continued patience. You see a new form of this person you once knew, and so my Oma’s journey through Alzheimer’s isn’t only influenced by my observations but watching my mom see her mother differently. The absolute calmness that I saw within my mother towards Oma but also the pain of seeing someone slowly forgetting you. Oma was born into a family of fourteen children, but she could easily name every single one of them up into her early stages of Alzheimer’s. When my aunt Arisa asked her, “How do you not forget some of them?” Oma replied with, “How could I forget.” And that is one of the hardest things to watch when observing someone with dementia. Memories she thought she would never forget are suddenly harder to find within the deep recesses of our minds. Oma had so many stories to share that are important to who she was but also to understanding how to live our lives today. We didn’t hear her stories anymore after she entered Crista Shores and we relied solely on her facial expressions. At certain times she would speak but it would be a mix of the four languages she was fluent in: Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Dutch.
Katrina experienced first hand oppression when the Japanese took control of Java on March 9th, 1942. Japanese officers began taking families from their homes and putting them in internment camps to keep the Europeans from interfering with their domination. Several hundred of these internment camps existed across the East Indies and other Pacific Islands in their control. Over 300,000 people were forced to live in them. Her dad was in the Dutch army so they were immediately placed in an internment camp in the outskirts of Jakarta. The conditions that she lived during her teen years here marked some of her earliest memories. She watched as her homeland was swept up by the Japanese and taken away from her. Every Dutch citizen was stripped of all but bare necessities and taken to prison camps. Men and women were separated from each other and placed with strangers. There were schedules and regulations in the camps, times to wake up and times to go to sleep. Jobs were administered to everyone– anything from making dinner to cleaning the soldiers’ houses. Guards were constantly around, coming in and out of homes in the camp. Prisoners were expected to greet the soldiers in Japanese and not correctly pronouncing their language would upset them. Oma began learning Japanese at this time in the internment camp.
Oma was fourteen years old in the concentration camps. The barracks she lived in were far out from the city of Batavia which is now known as Jakarta. Her mother’s friend lived a couple barracks down from Oma’s house. One day her mother asked her friend to come for tea at 2:30 that afternoon but she never showed up. Oma’s told her to go get her from her house, worried that something bad had happened. Oma found her mother’s friend laying down in bed with a ten foot snake lying across her body. Oma could vividly describe the snake as it lay on the woman’s paralyzed body. She says it was old based on the amount of skin falling off it’s black, grey, and white colored body. Since Oma was the first one to find her she ran to find the owner of the property that the concentration camp was located on. The man was an animal communicator and believed that the snake was acting as the communicator for the paralyzed woman.“Are you hungry?” The snake shook his head no. “Would you like some tea?”The snake nodded it’s head yes. “How many teaspoons of sugar? One?” The snake nodded again. The man gave the drink to the woman instead while the snake lay still watching her drink it.“Would you like a cigarette?” The man asked the woman this time and she nodded approval because she couldn’t speak. When the woman would exhale the cigarette the smoke would blow into the face of the snake. Oma says the snake inhaled the smoke from the woman. The snake eventually slithered off the woman’s body and Oma followed it where it dove into a small hole in the ground outside. This large, ten foot snake went down the hole and flicked its tail and closed the dirt behind him. Not long after the snake had disappeared, the sick woman died. Oma remembers the red ants that covered the woman the day they found her dead inside the barracks. “I can see it like it was yesterday” Oma said as she recalls burying the woman in white sheets and helping her family bury her in the ground, close to where the snake had disappeared that one day. Her mother’s beloved friend was wrapped in white sheets and buried in the ground because her family had no money to do a proper Indonesian burial.
Stories like these lay in audio recordings Oma had requested my Aunt Arisa make three year before she found out she had Alzheimer’s disease. You wouldn’t know that the woman who described the colours of the snake on the woman’s body would develop Alzheimer’s. She needed total support around the clock for daily living and the quality of her care became intensively important. At Crista Assisted Living home, a few of the caregivers were from Oma’s homeland of Indonesia and spoke her native language. Oma’s children didn’t grow up in Indonesia so this grounding to her home was important for keeping her mind active. My mom and I used to take her to the “Sun Room” located inside of Crista. We would wheel her past the automatic doors leading to the courtyard that we usually booked for our day out with Oma. The room had a biblical reference painted on the sunburnt orange wall and a table faced the blinds surrounded by floral printed chairs. My grandmother was a great singer and she grew up singing songs with her family in Sulawesi. Oma couldn’t remember our names most of the time, nor how to pick up her fork but as soon as we began singing an old Indonesian song “Esamo” she would tap her hand against her leg and start to sing it. That was what astounded me. The gracefulness as her lips moved with the words, her pink lips bright (my mom had brushed them with lipstick), as if we had the old Oma back even if it was for a short time. Her gorgeous brown hair had turned to a sophisticated pearl white against dark eyes. She was happiest when she was singing even in her old age. The crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes would deceive you from seeing the hard life that she had endured.
In the summer of 2013 Oma’s youngest son Bobby died of esophagus cancer. Bobby was the life of the party, usually in high spirits, and a huge taste for adventure. He traveled the world as a crew member on multiple cruise liners, and saw places like Tahiti, Antarctica, Africa, and many more. On rare occasions he came back to his bachelor pad in Bellevue, Seattle and got around to seeing his family a few days after. He had a thirst for wanderlust that could never be quenched. Sometimes my cousin Reed and I would stay with him for a few nights and Bobby would act like our best friend instead of an adult. He’d take us inner-tubing on Lake Washington and tell us to be careful for the snapping turtles that would nibble on our feet and (trust me) we believed him. After a long day floating on the lake he would make us orange creamsicle milkshakes and pour it into two Tiki-men themed mugs. I think that most of his siblings tried to live their adventurous side through him, because at family celebrations we’d be waiting to hear about his latest story. I remember eagerly waiting for the mailman to deliver his latest collection of stamps he’d send me from some distant part of the world. But in 2009 he met his wife Toni and she whisked him along to Australia permanently and I didn’t see him again.
Bobby had many, many friends in his forty-five years alive and his death was a devastating loss for not only our immediate family. We decided that his funeral would be a celebration of life instead of a normal funeral procession. My cousins and I hand wove 130 bracelets for the guests and each prepared a small speech for the funeral. Oma had mostly forgotten our names by now and she would have no idea how to interpret us telling her that Bobby had passed away before her. My family made the heart wrenching decision to bring her to the funeral because that’s what she would have wanted. We dressed her in a traditional Muumuu that Bobby had given her long ago and wheeled her around the funeral. People would stop and give their condolences to her but she had no idea. My Uncle Bobby’s friend made a compilation of photos from Bobby’s life and we all sat around to watch while the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” played in the background. One photo was Bobby dancing with his mom, both smiling ear to ear. I looked over at Oma’s expressionless face as she looked around while this image danced on the screen. Alzheimer’s made her oblivious to her youngest son’s death and even this long standing photo of a memory couldn’t withstand the disease. As humans we take pictures to prolong a memory that has passed, to keep it as long as it is meaningful to us. When it comes to dementia, sometimes photos can’t help us. Weeks after the funeral Oma would have small moments of clarity in her thoughts. She asked us multiple times where Bobby was and my mom would tell her, “he’s on the beach in Tahiti, mom” and for the most part, I believed that too.
Oma’s life changed drastically when she met Darrell Bob Houston from Seattle, Washington. At the time they met he was a stationed writer for The Star’s and Stripes a newspaper that published articles for the U.S. Military community. A week before Oma met D.B. she was visiting her friend Connie a half Indonesian/Dutch psychic who said “Katrina, you’re going to meet someone.” Oma was suprised and replied, “How can I meet someone, I’m so short!” Sure enough her friend from Tokyo wanted to open a bar there in Indonesia but because he was a foreigner wasn’t allowed to. He asked Oma to sign her name as the owner and in return he’d pay her. So there she was, a week later, sitting on a bar stool at the bar called Sinar Bulan (Indonesian meaning moonlight.) A tall, olive skinned, American man greeted her in Indonesian, “Salamet Malon.” We later learned that he had asked someone how to say good evening just so he could meet her.
“What’s your name?” he pressed on.
“ Katrina Miller,” Oma didn’t know why but she blurted out a fake last name.
“That’s my mother’s name, Minnie Miller,” D.B. replied. After that she must have told him her real last name because he kept coming back to see her. Oma was smitten with this American man and was willing to move to the United States for him. The year was 1948 and during this time a GI had to get permission to marry a foreign woman. Between 1942 and 1952 over one million American soldiers were marrying foreign women from 50 different countries. They came from places such as Britain, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Also, 50,000 to 100,000 servicemen married women from non allied countries like the Far East and Japan. In the case of Katrina, she was from The Dutch East Indies, a non allied country. The U.S. Military was discouraging servicemen from marrying foreign women because of the impact a family could have on their duty. The military weren’t the only ones who were concerned, American women were upset with foreign women taking away their chance at being with them. Since so many soldiers were marrying foreign women, immigration laws of the U.S. prohibited the admission of foreigners to 150,000 per year. Eventually the U.S. congress passed Public law 271, The War Brides Act. The law facilitated entrance to the US for alien wives of U.S. citizens if they were in active service during World War II. Oma was granted access because of D.B. and thus became an American citizen, starting a new chapter in her life away from all she ever knew.
Darrell Bob Houston was first and foremost a writer. He wrote for The Stars and Stripes, The Guam Daily News, Seattle Weekly, Seattle P-I, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, and Saga Magazine, The Oregon Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, and The Olympian. D.B. was lanky tall, always disheveled blonde hair, and usually spent all hours of the a.m. writing madly on his typewriter. He was very serious about his love of tennis and drinking. D.B. got a scholarship to the University of Hawaii shortly after their wedding. When my Aunt Arisa asked her what she thought of Hawaii she said, “They love me over there!” In Hawaii many Japanese lived there and Katrina loved being able to speak the language with them. At a small grocery store she went to it was opened by an older Japanese woman who let her pay on honor code because she liked her so much. Oma’s life changed drastically when she decided to become an American. She officially gained her citizenship while she was staying in Hawaii by being tutored by a professor from the University of Hawaii. Katrina and D.B. had a tempestuous relationship. Some nights he would be typewriting until dawn and others he’d be gone. By the time my mom was fourteen years old in 1969 he was pretty much permanently out of the house. Oma was struggling to provide for her three children (still at home) on her own in Seattle. They were living in a haunted house on Capitol Hill (a really dodgy neighborhood back then) by the Volunteer Park Reservoir. It was Christmas Eve and they had no heat, no money, and the only food they had was a slab of bacon and an onion. Kerrie, Bobby, and Leilani stood over by the stove warming their hands while Oma diced up the bacon and onion to make them a meal. My mom remembers, “It smelled so good but it was all we had.” My mom started crying as she thought about how hard her mom tried. The toys underneath their tree were from the Salvation Army that donated presents to poor families, they found out later that the presents inside were all broken. After their dinner my mom overheard Oma crying in her bedroom talking on the phone to her friend Leina and asking her if they could come stay the night. Leina’s son drove through the snow that night to Capitol Hill and picked them all up and made them dinner. There were a lot of nights where Oma had to make up meals like that for the family and it mostly came from her waiting in long welfare lines for food.
There were many nights like these as the rest of the children grew up and eventually left their home. Oma was strict while the kids grew up, and a life without help from their father caused many cold nights and hungry days. Decades later, Oma was on the other side of the road. Her children were now responsible for the quality of her life. The halls at Crista Shore are haunting, filled with so many people that have lost their sense of being. As I used to wander the hallways I would ask myself if I’d be the woman sitting in her wheelchair with the baby doll caressed in her arms, the woman waiting for help to lift her fork, the lady confined to her bed, or the woman with the bright eyes walking endlessly through the halls and hands clasped behind her back. On a particular visit we had spent the day in the Sun Room and my mom and I were wheeling her to the lunch room. I held her petite Indonesian hand with her long and healthy fingernails poking my palms while my mom wheeled her around the woman dispensing pills from a large cart to the patients. We set her over by the window with a few other women and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders because she kept shivering. “I’m going to go now, Mom,” my mom kneeled in front of Oma and kissed her cheek. As she got closer to grandma’s face, Oma’s eyes stared steadily back. “I love you.” My mom leaned forward and started to kiss her cheek and then got up from her knees, not expecting a response. “Love you,” Oma said. I saw my mom look at me for a
Alzheimer’s: Caught Between Two Worlds
Vairea Houston

I watched as the perfect pink rose I set on my grandmother’s casket was lowered into the ground. Beautiful and serene like her, that rose would remain within the ground. I don’t think you can register that someone you love has passed until it’s staring you in the face. I then began to sob on the shoulder of my Uncle, who put his arm around me in comfort. But there is no comfort in death, so I accepted his shoulder to shield me from my own grief. My estranged family all stood in a half moon around the burial plot while the hearse driver stayed unusually close behind, watching. We all stood about five feet from each other, uncomfortable. Five days after her death, Oma (Dutch for grandmother) was here in Bainbridge Island, being buried in the plot her friend had given her. The day was bright but a breeze kept me wrapping a shawl around my arms, it seemed understandable that the day would keep its chill. It had hit me that I would never hear her tell a story again, or hold her hand as we wheeled her around when the sun came out to play. I hoped that she saw me from up above, and recognized me one last time.
Katrina Rutunuwu was born January 5th 1929 in Sumatra, Indonesia to her Indonesian parents, Martinez and Katerina Rutunuwu. She was one of fourteen children. Her father was in the Dutch army so they often moved around throughout what was then the Dutch East Indies. After Katrina was born they moved from Sumatra to Jakarta.One of her earliest memories is her family’s trip to her grandparent’s farm in Sulawesi when she was eight years old. She recalls her grandparents waking her up at 5 am to go to their fields for food. An old wagon pulled them along through the fields, led by a Caribou. You can hear the fondness of Oma’s memory as she describes the excitement all her siblings felt when told they would be traveling in a wagon for the first time. She was told to wash up in the stream before they ate. She washed her face in a cold, clear stream that ran from the mountains down through their property. It was then that Oma ate her first pineapple on that field in Sulawesi. “It was so sweet and delicious,” she said. It was five days of firsts for the children visiting their grandparents. They spent nights in a tree house while her grandma would build fires down below them to keep the wild boars from eating their crops. In the morning they would wake up to fresh rice from the fields, it was sweet and green. Her grandparents would make bbq corn, sugar cane for dessert, and make a drink out of a nearby tree that produced sweet and sour liquid. It was stories like this that my grandma would tell me when I was little and they were always so bright and vivid like you were watching them through a magnifying glass.
On December 12th, 2008 Oma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It was then that we saw her change. She began to tell the same stories repeatedly, from forgetting where she put her jewelry, to forgetting where she was. She couldn’t live on her own anymore, so she moved from her apartment in Bainbridge Island to Crista Senior Living in Silverdale, Washington. It was a small distance from Bainbridge Island but a huge difference in her lifestyle. She was limited to the amount of things she could bring with her, she wasn’t allowed jewelry, had only a few pairs of clothes, and only a few pictures on her side of the room. She had to live with other ladies and had strict breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours to adhere to. Trips anywhere had to be done with family or on designated days with other seniors. There were days we picked her up that begged us not to take her back, so she would stay over and my mom would pamper her. It was days like those that were painful to see. I’d watch my mom walk Oma to her room and kiss her goodbye, and I saw Oma’s fear of being alone. It reminded me of when my mom would leave me in kindergarten. For the first couple week I was so confused, why did I have to be around all these strangers? My mom felt so guilty leaving her therefor she had switched from being the daughter to being the mother.
I saw her Alzheimer’s progressively advance during her stay at Crista. She had a harder time distinguishing our names, accused her family members of stealing her things, and felt threatened by her neighbors, and old friends. She began roaming the hallways at night and forgetting where she was. She went beyond the services of a senior living home and needed to be in assisted living to be completely taken care of. My mom and Uncle Rio found Crista Shores Assisted Living in Edmonds, Washington. This, where Oma spent over five years of her life, are the most vivid in my memory. The entrance gives off a warm embracing feeling that I remember mostly during the first winter she lived there. A fireplace greets you, surrounded by leather sofas, and tables offering snacks and refreshments. You receive a name tag that sticks onto your clothing for at least thirty minutes of your stay. They divide up the hallways by naming the wings after different types of trees. Oma was located in Dogwood, and all separate wings were locked with passcodes so seniors wouldn’t get lost. Although the entrance gives off an inviting feeling for guests, the rooms gave me the chills. They were all covered in white blank walls, hospital looking beds that were easily adjusted and very sparse decorations. Outside each room was a plaque describing the person living there, how old they were, and where they called home. She called herself Cathy here in America and that’s what the sign read. At the entrance to Dogwood, a sign-in book held the signatures of those that visited and the day they came. In the first few months her only visitors had been me, Leilani (my mother), Uncle Rio, and his wife Rita. Oma’s stages of Alzheimer’s had taken over aggressively in those months and it was unfortunate that the rest of our family weren’t here to see it. Other seniors were at different stages, some stages were indistinguishable by the naked eye. I saw some wander the hallways in curiosity and other glued to their beds or wheelchairs. Oma began using a wheelchair during her stay at the first living home because of the bunions that made it too painful to walk.
Being around someone with Alzheimer’s means handling with their mood swings and not looking for their recognition for your continued patience. You see a new form of this person you once knew, and so my Oma’s journey through Alzheimer’s isn’t only influenced by my observations but watching my mom see her mother differently. The absolute calmness that I saw within my mother towards Oma but also the pain of seeing someone slowly forgetting you. Oma was born into a family of fourteen children, but she could easily name every single one of them up into her early stages of Alzheimer’s. When my aunt Arisa asked her, “How do you not forget some of them?” Oma replied with, “How could I forget.” And that is one of the hardest things to watch when observing someone with dementia. Memories she thought she would never forget are suddenly harder to find within the deep recesses of our minds. Oma had so many stories to share that are important to who she was but also to understanding how to live our lives today. We didn’t hear her stories anymore after she entered Crista Shores and we relied solely on her facial expressions. At certain times she would speak but it would be a mix of the four languages she was fluent in: Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Dutch.
Katrina experienced first hand oppression when the Japanese took control of Java on March 9th, 1942. Japanese officers began taking families from their homes and putting them in internment camps to keep the Europeans from interfering with their domination. Several hundred of these internment camps existed across the East Indies and other Pacific Islands in their control. Over 300,000 people were forced to live in them. Her dad was in the Dutch army so they were immediately placed in an internment camp in the outskirts of Jakarta. The conditions that she lived during her teen years here marked some of her earliest memories. She watched as her homeland was swept up by the Japanese and taken away from her. Every Dutch citizen was stripped of all but bare necessities and taken to prison camps. Men and women were separated from each other and placed with strangers. There were schedules and regulations in the camps, times to wake up and times to go to sleep. Jobs were administered to everyone– anything from making dinner to cleaning the soldiers’ houses. Guards were constantly around, coming in and out of homes in the camp. Prisoners were expected to greet the soldiers in Japanese and not correctly pronouncing their language would upset them. Oma began learning Japanese at this time in the internment camp.
Oma was fourteen years old in the concentration camps. The barracks she lived in were far out from the city of Batavia which is now known as Jakarta. Her mother’s friend lived a couple barracks down from Oma’s house. One day her mother asked her friend to come for tea at 2:30 that afternoon but she never showed up. Oma’s told her to go get her from her house, worried that something bad had happened. Oma found her mother’s friend laying down in bed with a ten foot snake lying across her body. Oma could vividly describe the snake as it lay on the woman’s paralyzed body. She says it was old based on the amount of skin falling off it’s black, grey, and white colored body. Since Oma was the first one to find her she ran to find the owner of the property that the concentration camp was located on. The man was an animal communicator and believed that the snake was acting as the communicator for the paralyzed woman.“Are you hungry?” The snake shook his head no. “Would you like some tea?”The snake nodded it’s head yes. “How many teaspoons of sugar? One?” The snake nodded again. The man gave the drink to the woman instead while the snake lay still watching her drink it.“Would you like a cigarette?” The man asked the woman this time and she nodded approval because she couldn’t speak. When the woman would exhale the cigarette the smoke would blow into the face of the snake. Oma says the snake inhaled the smoke from the woman. The snake eventually slithered off the woman’s body and Oma followed it where it dove into a small hole in the ground outside. This large, ten foot snake went down the hole and flicked its tail and closed the dirt behind him. Not long after the snake had disappeared, the sick woman died. Oma remembers the red ants that covered the woman the day they found her dead inside the barracks. “I can see it like it was yesterday” Oma said as she recalls burying the woman in white sheets and helping her family bury her in the ground, close to where the snake had disappeared that one day. Her mother’s beloved friend was wrapped in white sheets and buried in the ground because her family had no money to do a proper Indonesian burial.
Stories like these lay in audio recordings Oma had requested my Aunt Arisa make three year before she found out she had Alzheimer’s disease. You wouldn’t know that the woman who described the colours of the snake on the woman’s body would develop Alzheimer’s. She needed total support around the clock for daily living and the quality of her care became intensively important. At Crista Assisted Living home, a few of the caregivers were from Oma’s homeland of Indonesia and spoke her native language. Oma’s children didn’t grow up in Indonesia so this grounding to her home was important for keeping her mind active. My mom and I used to take her to the “Sun Room” located inside of Crista. We would wheel her past the automatic doors leading to the courtyard that we usually booked for our day out with Oma. The room had a biblical reference painted on the sunburnt orange wall and a table faced the blinds surrounded by floral printed chairs. My grandmother was a great singer and she grew up singing songs with her family in Sulawesi. Oma couldn’t remember our names most of the time, nor how to pick up her fork but as soon as we began singing an old Indonesian song “Esamo” she would tap her hand against her leg and start to sing it. That was what astounded me. The gracefulness as her lips moved with the words, her pink lips bright (my mom had brushed them with lipstick), as if we had the old Oma back even if it was for a short time. Her gorgeous brown hair had turned to a sophisticated pearl white against dark eyes. She was happiest when she was singing even in her old age. The crow’s feet in the corner of her eyes would deceive you from seeing the hard life that she had endured.
In the summer of 2013 Oma’s youngest son Bobby died of esophagus cancer. Bobby was the life of the party, usually in high spirits, and a huge taste for adventure. He traveled the world as a crew member on multiple cruise liners, and saw places like Tahiti, Antarctica, Africa, and many more. On rare occasions he came back to his bachelor pad in Bellevue, Seattle and got around to seeing his family a few days after. He had a thirst for wanderlust that could never be quenched. Sometimes my cousin Reed and I would stay with him for a few nights and Bobby would act like our best friend instead of an adult. He’d take us inner-tubing on Lake Washington and tell us to be careful for the snapping turtles that would nibble on our feet and (trust me) we believed him. After a long day floating on the lake he would make us orange creamsicle milkshakes and pour it into two Tiki-men themed mugs. I think that most of his siblings tried to live their adventurous side through him, because at family celebrations we’d be waiting to hear about his latest story. I remember eagerly waiting for the mailman to deliver his latest collection of stamps he’d send me from some distant part of the world. But in 2009 he met his wife Toni and she whisked him along to Australia permanently and I didn’t see him again.
Bobby had many, many friends in his forty-five years alive and his death was a devastating loss for not only our immediate family. We decided that his funeral would be a celebration of life instead of a normal funeral procession. My cousins and I hand wove 130 bracelets for the guests and each prepared a small speech for the funeral. Oma had mostly forgotten our names by now and she would have no idea how to interpret us telling her that Bobby had passed away before her. My family made the heart wrenching decision to bring her to the funeral because that’s what she would have wanted. We dressed her in a traditional Muumuu that Bobby had given her long ago and wheeled her around the funeral. People would stop and give their condolences to her but she had no idea. My Uncle Bobby’s friend made a compilation of photos from Bobby’s life and we all sat around to watch while the song “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” played in the background. One photo was Bobby dancing with his mom, both smiling ear to ear. I looked over at Oma’s expressionless face as she looked around while this image danced on the screen. Alzheimer’s made her oblivious to her youngest son’s death and even this long standing photo of a memory couldn’t withstand the disease. As humans we take pictures to prolong a memory that has passed, to keep it as long as it is meaningful to us. When it comes to dementia, sometimes photos can’t help us. Weeks after the funeral Oma would have small moments of clarity in her thoughts. She asked us multiple times where Bobby was and my mom would tell her, “he’s on the beach in Tahiti, mom” and for the most part, I believed that too.
Oma’s life changed drastically when she met Darrell Bob Houston from Seattle, Washington. At the time they met he was a stationed writer for The Star’s and Stripes a newspaper that published articles for the U.S. Military community. A week before Oma met D.B. she was visiting her friend Connie a half Indonesian/Dutch psychic who said “Katrina, you’re going to meet someone.” Oma was suprised and replied, “How can I meet someone, I’m so short!” Sure enough her friend from Tokyo wanted to open a bar there in Indonesia but because he was a foreigner wasn’t allowed to. He asked Oma to sign her name as the owner and in return he’d pay her. So there she was, a week later, sitting on a bar stool at the bar called Sinar Bulan (Indonesian meaning moonlight.) A tall, olive skinned, American man greeted her in Indonesian, “Salamet Malon.” We later learned that he had asked someone how to say good evening just so he could meet her.
“What’s your name?” he pressed on.
“ Katrina Miller,” Oma didn’t know why but she blurted out a fake last name.
“That’s my mother’s name, Minnie Miller,” D.B. replied. After that she must have told him her real last name because he kept coming back to see her. Oma was smitten with this American man and was willing to move to the United States for him. The year was 1948 and during this time a GI had to get permission to marry a foreign woman. Between 1942 and 1952 over one million American soldiers were marrying foreign women from 50 different countries. They came from places such as Britain, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Also, 50,000 to 100,000 servicemen married women from non allied countries like the Far East and Japan. In the case of Katrina, she was from The Dutch East Indies, a non allied country. The U.S. Military was discouraging servicemen from marrying foreign women because of the impact a family could have on their duty. The military weren’t the only ones who were concerned, American women were upset with foreign women taking away their chance at being with them. Since so many soldiers were marrying foreign women, immigration laws of the U.S. prohibited the admission of foreigners to 150,000 per year. Eventually the U.S. congress passed Public law 271, The War Brides Act. The law facilitated entrance to the US for alien wives of U.S. citizens if they were in active service during World War II. Oma was granted access because of D.B. and thus became an American citizen, starting a new chapter in her life away from all she ever knew.
Darrell Bob Houston was first and foremost a writer. He wrote for The Stars and Stripes, The Guam Daily News, Seattle Weekly, Seattle P-I, Seattle Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, and Saga Magazine, The Oregon Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, and The Olympian. D.B. was lanky tall, always disheveled blonde hair, and usually spent all hours of the a.m. writing madly on his typewriter. He was very serious about his love of tennis and drinking. D.B. got a scholarship to the University of Hawaii shortly after their wedding. When my Aunt Arisa asked her what she thought of Hawaii she said, “They love me over there!” In Hawaii many Japanese lived there and Katrina loved being able to speak the language with them. At a small grocery store she went to it was opened by an older Japanese woman who let her pay on honor code because she liked her so much. Oma’s life changed drastically when she decided to become an American. She officially gained her citizenship while she was staying in Hawaii by being tutored by a professor from the University of Hawaii. Katrina and D.B. had a tempestuous relationship. Some nights he would be typewriting until dawn and others he’d be gone. By the time my mom was fourteen years old in 1969 he was pretty much permanently out of the house. Oma was struggling to provide for her three children (still at home) on her own in Seattle. They were living in a haunted house on Capitol Hill (a really dodgy neighborhood back then) by the Volunteer Park Reservoir. It was Christmas Eve and they had no heat, no money, and the only food they had was a slab of bacon and an onion. Kerrie, Bobby, and Leilani stood over by the stove warming their hands while Oma diced up the bacon and onion to make them a meal. My mom remembers, “It smelled so good but it was all we had.” My mom started crying as she thought about how hard her mom tried. The toys underneath their tree were from the Salvation Army that donated presents to poor families, they found out later that the presents inside were all broken. After their dinner my mom overheard Oma crying in her bedroom talking on the phone to her friend Leina and asking her if they could come stay the night. Leina’s son drove through the snow that night to Capitol Hill and picked them all up and made them dinner. There were a lot of nights where Oma had to make up meals like that for the family and it mostly came from her waiting in long welfare lines for food.
There were many nights like these as the rest of the children grew up and eventually left their home. Oma was strict while the kids grew up, and a life without help from their father caused many cold nights and hungry days. Decades later, Oma was on the other side of the road. Her children were now responsible for the quality of her life. The halls at Crista Shore are haunting, filled with so many people that have lost their sense of being. As I used to wander the hallways I would ask myself if I’d be the woman sitting in her wheelchair with the baby doll caressed in her arms, the woman waiting for help to lift her fork, the lady confined to her bed, or the woman with the bright eyes walking endlessly through the halls and hands clasped behind her back. On a particular visit we had spent the day in the Sun Room and my mom and I were wheeling her to the lunch room. I held her petite Indonesian hand with her long and healthy fingernails poking my palms while my mom wheeled her around the woman dispensing pills from a large cart to the patients. We set her over by the window with a few other women and wrapped a shawl around her shoulders because she kept shivering. “I’m going to go now, Mom,” my mom kneeled in front of Oma and kissed her cheek. As she got closer to grandma’s face, Oma’s eyes stared steadily back. “I love you.” My mom leaned forward and started to kiss her cheek and then got up from her knees, not expecting a response. “Love you,” Oma said. I saw my mom look at me for a second, surprised. I shook my head, surprised back. We looked down at her. She was staring at my mom and I swear, her eyes were so clear at that moment. Growing up Oma had never told my mom that she loved her. Here was Oma, confined to this white walled hospital-like room around complete strangers but had just made my mom’s world. “I love you too, Mom,” she said it again, glued to the spot. It took all her perseverance to walk away that day and not look back.