My grandmother Katerina Rutunuwu recently passed away from Alzheimer’s. I never truly had the stereotypical experience of my grandma baking me cookies or sending me postcards. She lived in Bainbridge Island while I spent my childhood in Maui, Hawaii. She was a 5′ 2” Indonesian womanm proud of her heritage, but always reserved. I heard many stories of her strict parenting from my mother, that Katerina supported her five children on her own. My Oma is the only grandparent of mine that I got to know, everyone else passed away before I got to know them.  It wasn’t until we moved to Port Townsend, Washington that we lived close enough to spend time with her. My earliest memories with my grandma were watching her favorite show, wrestling. Her small apartment building always smelled like curry and rice. Her Mont Blanc pen would lay next to personalized stationary and her hand writing was distinctly elegant.

My grandma had lived in that small apartment for over ten years. When I was a sophomore in High School, we started to get panicked calls from her in the middle of the night. One night she said that the people washing the outside of the apartment windows had climbed in while she was gone and stolen her jewelry. The next time she called she said that her neighbors were talking about her and she refused to leave her apartment. Finally, she told us that my cousin Chloe had stolen some of her clothes from her apartment. None of us knew why she was suddenly so suspicious of everyone in her life. Eventually she became so hysterical and afraid that we knew there had to be some reason for her change in character.

My grandma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and taken to Crista Shores Retirement home in Silverdale, Washington. It was around this time that I saw our whole family start to fall apart. My Uncle Bobby was off traveling the world as a crew member on The Royal Princess cruise liner and rarely came home to Washington. My Uncle Rio lived in Seattle, Washington and complained he lived too far away to visit her. My aunt Kerrie felt too busy to visit. At first I understood their excuses, but I watched my own mom get more frustrated everyday with her mother’s growing disease and her siblings neglect. Eventually, we got a call that Oma had been wondering the halls at night. She didn’t know where she was at times. None of the family members (including my parents) felt that they could handle taking care of her full time. She then had to be moved into an assisted living home farther away from us, in Seattle.
I remember a time that my mom, grandma, and I were driving back to our home from shopping together in Silverdale. We were having my grandma over for the weekend and we were driving over the Hood Canal Bridge. At the time I thought I had bought the most adorable Rocket Dog brand slip on shoes (I was in the eighth grade) they had imprints of puppies on them. Anyway, a song played on the radio that involved a lot of drum solos and sing-a longs. Suddenly my grandmother put her hands in a fist and started banging them across my shoe box and singing along to the music. We all chimed in. There were moments like this that made us all forget my grandma was sick, and she could come back to us through music.
As the years started drifting by, my grandma became more and more unresponsive. While she was sick, her youngest child Bobby passed away of cancer at only 45. She attended the celebration we had for his life but she didn’t know why she was there. That was one of the hardest moments for my mom, Oma didn’t even remember who all of her children were most of the time. Her own son passed away, and she never knew.

To be continued/edited..