Alzheimer’s: Caught Between Two Worlds
Vairea Houston
“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of
life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they
continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It
is as though they were traveling abroad.” Marcel Proust
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 forever. It’s hard to register that a loved one has passed away until you are staring at their casket. I began to sob on the shoulder of my Uncle Rio, 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 Katrina 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 an oxen. Oma talks about how excited all her siblings were to be traveling in a wagon for the first time. She was told to wash up in the stream before they ate. She would tell me about the cold, clear stream that ran from the mountains down through her grandparents 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, sweet and green. Her grandparents would make bbq corn, sugar cane for dessert, and 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. For years she had started developing Alzheimer’s while we were blaming her symptoms on old age. Once she was diagnosed we realized her actions over the last two years made sense. Earlier that year, my brother’s friend Julian was working at Town & Country, a little market down the street from Oma’s apartment in Bainbridge Island. It was pouring rain outside and he saw Oma wandering the store, completely drenched. He recognized her and asked her if she needed a ride home but she couldn’t tell him where her home was. Julian called my brother Dylan to ask where she lived and took her home. Finally we had a name for her disease. She began to tell the same stories repeatedly, from forgetting where she put her jewelry, to accusing her family of stealing her things. 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 possessions she could own, no jewelry, and only one cork board for pictures. She had to live with three other women 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. Initially her transition to Crista wasn’t smooth. There were days we picked her up that she begged us not to take her back, so she’d stay over and we’d do our best to pamper her while we could. When we would take her home I’d watch my mom walk Oma to her room and kiss her goodbye, and I saw Oma’s fear of being alone written across her face. It reminded me of a child’s face the first day you drop them off at Kindergarten like you won’t ever come back. It felt like this to Oma, and certain days it would take her longer to register who we were anymore. For her mind, she was living the life of a kindergartener, stuck with strangers, playing bingo, singing music, and taking senior field trips.
I saw Alzheimer’s slowly take over her life while she lived at Crista Senior Living. She began to have trouble remembering our names, where she used to live, and stories that she used to tell all the time. At night she would roam the hallways, restless, and forgetful. It escalated to the point that she needed to have assisted care. Finding the correct home to take care of Oma was essential to prolonging her life. My mom and Uncle Rio were the only two siblings proactive in taking the time to find the right place. They eventually found Crista Shores Assisted Living in Edmonds, Washington. This, where Oma spent the last five years of her life, are the most vivid in my memory. I recall the entrance of Crista, it’s warm embracing feeling around Christmas time. Ornaments dangling off the receptionists desk, a fireplace surrounded by couches. A refreshment table offers snacks for visitors. The receptionist with bold red hair asks you to write your name on a stick-on name tag (which barely sticks twenty minutes into your visit). Once you walk down the main hallway they start to steer off into separate wings, named after different types of trees. Oma was located in Dogwood, separated from the other wings by locked passcodes. While the entrance gives off an inviting feeling for guests, the rooms gave me the chills. Each room was covered in white blank walls, hospital looking beds that were easily adjusted, and very simple 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 just those few months. It was unfortunate that the rest of our family weren’t there to share moments with her while she was still alive. I observed other seniors who were at different stages of their dementia or care. I saw some wander the halls aimlessly, others glued to their beds, a few watching television, and many rocking a baby doll in their arms with a look of longing.
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 Leilani developed towards Oma after a few months of being one-on-one with her disease. 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.” Eventually Oma did forget her siblings, 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 her mind. Oma had so many stories to share that are important to who she was but also to understanding who I am as a person. Eventually her stories became scarce, the four languages she was fluent in (Malaysian, Indonesian, Japanese, and Dutch) were jumbled together into her own form of communication. We would nod our heads when she did speak, wanting to make her feel as stress free, and comfortable as possible.
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 control. 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, including Oma and her family. Her dad was in the Dutch army so they were 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, most that she chose not to share with us. 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. Soldiers expected their prisoners to greet them in Japanese only. I expect that Oma had to fight to survive, and rape by Japanese soldiers did exist. Guards were constantly around, coming in and out of homes in the 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 was told 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 years before we 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. The woman that experienced the hardships of daily life in an internment camp, and her childhood, riding through her grandparents fields in Sulawesi on the back of a wagon. 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 this was the one thing she never forget, even a week before her death. She would sing an Indonesian song from her childhood called “Esamo,” tap her leg and sing every word. Oma always wanted to be a singer, but she ended up working for Girl Scouts of America to support her family. Oma continued to astound me. The gracefulness as her lips moved with the words, her pink lips bright (my mom would brush 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 her dark brown 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 esophageal cancer. Bobby was similar to Oma in the way that he touched lives, always the life of the party, usually the center of attention. He had an unending taste for adventure, at a young age he began working as a crew member on a cruise ship. He traveled to places like Tahiti, Antarctica, Australia, and Hawaii (to name a few). It was rare that Bobby came home to his bachelor pad in Seattle, near Lake Washington. His siblings loved him and cherished those moments that he came home for Thanksgiving or Christmas. My cousin Reed and I looked up to him like a cool older brother, always begging him to take let us stay with him for the weekend. 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 we believed him. After a long day floating on the lake he would make us orange cream milkshakes and pour it into two Tiki-men themed mugs. He eventually met his wife Toni on a cruise ship and she finally got him to settle down in Australia, having two kids. He found out he was battling esophageal cancer only two years after his second child was born. While Bobby was in Australia battling cancer, Oma was dealing with Alzheimer’s. Bobby had many, friends in his forty-eight 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. We made the decision to bring her to the funeral. She had no idea why people were bombarding her with condolences, and in some ways that was better for her. A slideshow played and everyone sat to watch, including Oma in her wheelchair. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole played during the slideshow. A beautiful picture of Oma dancing with Bobby at her cousin’s wedding in Indonesia captivated everyone watching. As I looked over at Oma, she was expressionless, distant, not even noticing this image dancing on the screen. Alzheimer’s made her oblivious to loss of her youngest son, taking away her memories of him, and the ability to be with him for his last moments. 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 had random 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 chose to believe that too.
Oma met the love of her life, a writer, in Tokyo, Japan in 1951. How Oma got from Indonesia to Tokyo is still somewhat of a mystery. My family has tried to piece together things they remembered from their childhood and conversations they overheard to try and piece this part of Oma’s life together. She never spoke of how she got from the concentration camps to Japan and must have kept it a secret for a reason. In old letters from Netty (Oma’s youngest sister) to Oma she writes telling Oma how grateful she is for the sacrifice she made for the family during their life in the Internment camps. Often my mom heard her parents fighting, and they often brought up past arguments and experiences to strengthen the quarrel. D.B. would mention Oma having had a young baby boy to a Japanese soldier and losing that boy shortly after his birth. My mom and her sister Kerrie have considered the possibility that Oma could have been a “comfort woman” during World War II. During 1942, Yasuhiro Nakasone, a lieutenant paymaster in Japan’s Imperial Navy found that creating a military brothel would lift the mood of his troops. There’s been lots of speculation happening today because Japan refuses to make it a part of their historical record. Girls and women became comfort women from any place under the rule of the Japanese. In an article written by The New York Times, they write about comfort women during World War II, saying: “Interned Dutch mothers traded their bodies in a church at a convent on Java to feed their children.” We know that Oma’s father was in the Dutch Army and therefore a very prominent target of harassment from Japanese soldiers. It’s probable that Oma joined the comfort women during the war for the protection of her family.
Oma’s life changed drastically when she met Darrell Bob Houston from Seattle, Washington. She was in her early twenties in Tokyo, Japan. He was in the Korean War and stationed in Japan. 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 surprised, “How can I meet someone, I’m so short!” Sure enough her friend from Tokyo wanted to open a bar but wanted Oma to sign as the owner because he wasn’t allowed to, 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 the Far East and Japan. 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, Saga Magazine, The Oregon Journal, Tacoma News Tribune, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Hermiston Herald, and The Olympian. He was known as a gonzo journalist, using first person narrative to draw the reader to his articles. He encouraged young writers to think outside the box, to polish headlines like a valuable piece of artwork. Some of his headlines were, “America Louvres Her: Mona’s the Most– To Say the Lisa,” and “Twisting Debs Get In the Sacro-Silly Act.” Tom Robbins, a fellow writer and friend at the Seattle P.I. wrote this eulogy after D.B’s death:
Darrell Bob Houston was a reporter who got around. He caromed from newspaper to newspaper like a pinball under a wizard’s control: the Tokyo Stars & Stripes, the Hermiston Herald, the Daily Olympian, the Tacoma News Tribune, the L.A. Times, the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the Guam Daily News, but most of all the P-I. He was a Vietnam War correspondent and a 1970 Alicia Patterson Fellow in Japan; his most recent job was on a daily in Anchorage. He drove all the way up the rutted Al-Can Highway, sat down at his computer terminal—and left for home the next day. During the better part of the last decade, you couldn’t find a freer lance than Houston. He once wrote that “old newspapermen don’t fade away; they become anecdotes.” Some of Houston’s anecdotes are from his own work—see his tribute to the oldtime Northwest journalism (The Weekly, November 29, 1978), or his account of a pilgrimage to Kerouac’s old firewatch cabin on Desolation Peak (The Weekly, October 18, 1978). His death last week inspired a slew of Houston anecdotes. Rick Anderson recounted a choice few in a Seattle Times column in his honor, including the incident in which Houston sold Esquire (at the apex of its glory) a big story on the late Beat and Prankster Neal Cassady—and then made them send it back rather than permitting any damn nitwitted hamfisted editing of the piece…
A brilliant and eccentric writer, D.B. wasn’t a man held down by anyone. He had two lives, a tennis loving father and a freelance writer who celebrated on 45th and 7th NE at the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle with his friends. Together, Katrina and D.B. had five children. In order, Rio, Arisa, Leilani, Kerrie, and Bobby. My mom would fall asleep at night to the sound of his typewriter tap-tap-tapping into the night. He would set up a cot next to his Underwood typewriter to catch some sleep in between his writing, sometimes he’d even let her sleep next to him. He looked just like Ron Ely, the original Tarzan actor from 1966. Blonde hair, green eyes, tall, lean, and athletic. One of my mom’s earliest memories is from when she was four years old and she told her dad she wanted to marry him. He laughed and told her she couldn’t do that. As a kid she was like “Why? Why?” Despite D.B.’s faults as a father, he was the only one that gave the kids affection.
Katrina and D.B. had a tempestuous relationship, a normal day at home for my mom was their constant fighting. Heated exchanges happened everyday, hurtful words thrown like weapons. My mom was so young at the time she didn’t realize the impact those words had on Oma and her childhood, until now. Their marriage lasted for twenty years, off and on, but D.B. was a womanizer. If it wasn’t for that they probably would have lasted. D.B. had quite a few affairs during their marriage and my mom remembers a particular one. The whole family was staying in Tokyo for one year because D.B. had just won the coveted Alicia Patterson fellowship. Then, the fellowship granted a journalist to pursue a particular project and write for The APF Reporter for one year. D.B. wrote about Japan’s youth. It was summertime in Tokyo and the weather was unbearably hot. D.B. had been absent from home for a few days, so when he got back him and Oma fought. By this time Oma knew the warning signs, he was seeing another woman. One day D.B. took Kerrie, Leilani, and Bobby to the pool at one of the finest hotels in Tokyo, promising them lunch, and his company. The four of them were sitting by the pool when D.B. excuses himself, telling them he’ll be right back. Hours go by with no sign of him and they start to get worried. Finally, he approaches the pool with a young Japanese woman. They now register this as the end of Oma and D.B.’s marriage. The Japanese woman’s name was Yoko. D.B. paid for her college tuition, and her flights to and from Los Angeles while he worked at the Los Angeles Times. Eventually she left him for another man with more money and that left D.B. heartbroken, depressed, and suicidal. My mom remembers coming to see him after their breakup and his apartment was empty of all furniture (he left their home during this affair) and he would play “You’re so beautiful,” by Joe Cocker on and endless repeat.
By the time my mom was fourteen years old in 1969 D.B. was permanently out of the house. Oma was providing for her three children (that we’re still at home) on her own in Seattle, Washington with no help from their father. 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 one onion. Kerrie, Bobby, and Leilani stood over by the stove top warming their hands while Oma diced up the bacon and onion.“It smelled so good but it was all we had, ” my mom remembered. The memory of that night can still make my mom cry, thinking about how hard Oma tried. That Christmas the toys underneath their tree were from the Salvation Army, at that time they delivered presents to poor families. After eating my mom remembers standing by Oma’s bedroom door with Kerrie, hearing her crying on the phone. She was talking to her friend Leina asking if her and the kids could come stay the night. So on Christmas Eve Leina’s son drove through the snow on Capitol Hill and picked them all up. Everyday was a struggle, living on the income of just one parent
In 1984 D.B. died of melanoma. At his funeral Rio sang a Cole Porter song, “Don’t Fence Me In.” Part of the lyrics are, “Let me be myself in the evenin breeze and listen to the murmur of the cottonwood trees. Send me off forever but I ask you please don’t fence me in.” To my family these lyrics depict the man that D.B. was perfectly. A man you could not fence in, could not coral, could not control. He never camouflaged who he was, never pretended anything. He was a writer, lived and felt life to the extreme, and who also happened to be a father. When my mom was young he told her “Lani B don’t just see me as a father figure but also see the man.” She knew that this man, her father, could never be held down. She knew he couldn’t be a father, at least in the most conventional ways. When I asked my mom how she felt about her father leaving home, she said only this, “When you are a kid you accept your parents the way they are, no judgements, it’s your normal, and when he left my mom and his children, I couldn’t hold it against him… I loved him dearly and I understood who he was even more.”
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. 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 spoken the three words my mom had always wanted. “I love you too, Mom,” Leilani said again, glued to the spot. It took all her perseverance to walk away that day and not look back.
During the course of Oma’s disease I saw my family fall apart. The whole that was once our family became the half circle at her funeral. What lead up to that was a series of family feuds, built up over years of resentment, and finally peaked by Oma’s continued need of care. When Oma got sick, the family was unable to reach an agreement about Oma’s living situation. My mom and Rio found Crista Senior Living in Silverdale and at first all the siblings would visit her. When it was determined that Oma had to live in assisted living, no one took the time to help Rio and my mom find her next place to live. It was like Oma was too much of a burden for some of her kids. They didn’t know how to act around Oma when she forgot their names or began to speak in a jumbled language. Even throughout Oma’s disease I shared beautiful moments with her that I would never take back. I’m happy to say I was there. I was there when I would hear her singing like she was a young girl again, sitting on a field in Sulawesi. I held her hands when she was cold. I saw her smile even on her darkest days. I told her about my life in College and what I wanted to be when I got older. I saw my mom get the tenderness she always wanted from Oma and it didn’t matter that it took until she was sick to finally get it.
Seeing the guest book at my grandma’s assisted living home only hardened my mom and Rio. I saw their pain as Oma became quiet, and her hand’s colder. Everyone handles the loss of someone differently but I knew that seeing my grandma through even the toughest days was important for my growth as a person. I almost lost my father during my junior year of high school when we found out he was ill. Kerrie almost lost her husband when he had a heart attack in Singapore. Rio’s wife Rita was struggling with Parkinson’s disease. Our lives were becoming increasingly difficult. Resentment became the core of our family and when Oma passed we were forced to be in the same room together, the same burial plot in this case. The week before Oma passed away my mom called me to tell me that Oma was being visited by hospice nurses. Hospice provides end of life care to those considered terminal, when the patient is no longer receiving curative treatment. This news was a shock for me because just a few weeks before she was doing fine. But in only two weeks she had drastically declined. She lost her ability to swallow food, became bed ridden, needed assistance toileting, becoming increasingly susceptible to pneumonia. Hospice determined her life expectancy to be only a few more days. At this time I was living over two hours and a ferry boat away from Oma’s facility and my parents had moved to Hawaii. The day I headed out to say goodbye to Oma, I was also saying goodbye to her for my mom. I kept thinking to myself,
Please let me be able to say goodbye to her.
Please don’t let her die.
Just a few more hours.
At 12 PM my mom called me to say that Oma had passed away. I replied back, “What?” as if her passing away before I got there couldn’t be true. As if she would wait to pass until I could see her. I didn’t cry immediately, I just sat in disbelief. You would think that watching someone’s progression through Alzheimer’s would ready you for the worst to come. Yet, my grandma was so beautiful and undeniably strong even throughout seven years battling the disease. I wasn’t ready to stop sitting next to her in the “Sun Room” at Crista Shores and telling her about my life.
“How late was I to see her?” I asked my mom before she hung up to call the rest of her family.
“She died at 4 am this morning. Rio only just told me a few minutes ago.” Six hours after her death I was being told. Six hours ago my grandma had passed with no word from Rio who had been at her bedside when she passed away that morning. My mom was the first to find out then she told me, Kerrie, and Arisa. I was so mad to find out so late and upset that if I had gone yesterday I could have seen her. The fact that Rio had waited so long to share the news only proves how broken our family was. Within five days after she died Rio had taken complete control of the funeral arrangements without getting any of our input. Neither my parents, my cousins, or any of Oma’s family from Indonesia could make it in time. We all gathered in a half circle around her casket that was strewn in separate stems from a bouquet of roses that Kerrie had bought before the funeral. Oma’s life was summed up on a notecard read by a man dressed in a Hawaiian t-shirt and dress slacks who kept stuttering over the words as if he had written them down a few minutes before the funeral. He played the song Over the Rainbow by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole which was the same song played at Bobby’s funeral. He played the song through his “Ihome” music device which he set behind him next to her casket. She was the kind of woman that may have led an untraditional life but she wanted a traditional funeral. Her friend had given her the plot in Bainbridge Island and she was insistent on being buried there. She wanted a Catholic funeral that included a priest to oversee the necessary rites to be administered and held at a funeral home for all her friends and family to talk about. Instead we had this man reading Oma’s life as if she had lived only for a few minutes. When he asked if anyone had anything to say we all were silent from our own discomfort.
Now a year after the funeral, I’m finally trying to encompass all that made up Katrina Rutunuwu. Every memory I experienced, or I heard matter to making her story become whole. Her battle with Alzheimer’s disease, is a battle that other people can relate too. It’s a disease that eats at every particle of memory that you built your entire life experiencing, being taken without your acceptance. At the end of the audio recordings Arisa had made, she asked Oma, “Do you have anything to say to your family that will listen to these tapes someday?”
“Just to have a happy new year and let there be peace in the family,” but there wasn’t peace in the family and there hadn’t been any for a long time.