INVISIBLE WOUNDS | Yona Feit

When I was a girl, my grandmother and I collected Limoges boxes: miniature porcelain objects of furniture, instruments, foods and animals that opened and closed with a clasp. Every time I visited her house, she would lead me to a corner in her dining room where she had arranged an array of small packages and let me pick the new addition to our collection. I would run my fingers over the protective bubble wrap disguising its contents, pretending the curves and edges would disclose for me what was concealed underneath. “This one feels like a dog, this one feels like a shoe, and this one is a banana!” We would laugh at how far my prediction fell from the object's true mark and form.

The manifestations of my grandmother’s early dementia were like these porcelain boxes, wrapped and covered by the protective bubble wrap of skin, body, compensatory gestures and evasions. My grandmother was not typically a big sharer, a product of her European upbringing, Holocaust survivor status and losing her husband suddenly at a young age. She kept her life’s wounds covered in silence, choosing instead to focus on what she could still experience in the here and now: theater outings, shopping trips and world travel. She was a master of languages—English, Hebrew, French, Flemish, German, Latin, Yiddish—and a consumer of experiences. Instead of sharing her feelings, she filled our lives with a to-do list of places to go, things to see, lectures to attend, travel stories to retell and relish. She never divulged that her cognition was slowly declining, protecting herself from confronting the grim reality descending upon her. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps she did not even realize; like our own game of incorrectly guessing box shapes, she laughed off mistaken names and dates and stories.

One year at the conclusion of our choosing ritual I dropped the selected, newly unwrapped box. It hit the ground and scattered across the dining room floor. I attempted to collect and reconstruct the broken pieces, hoping to restore its original shape. “I can fix it,” I said. She went into the other room and returned with a broom and wastebasket. “That's ok, sweetie,” she said, as she discarded the remnants. “Some things are just meant to stay broken.”

For more than five years my grandmother has, herself, been unwrapping and breaking before our very eyes. Her ability to talk, walk, follow objects, conversations, sing, hum, make eye contact, have now long been shattered. Our visits today consist of a different type of guessing as to what lay underneath the protective wrapping, none of us ever sure of the cognitive condition we’ll face that day.

I remember the first time I realized my grandmother was demonstrating early signs of dementia. She was staying with us for the holidays and my parents had already left for work. I woke up suddenly to the smell of smoke and the ringing of our fire alarm. I darted downstairs to find my grandmother sitting calmly in the adjoining breakfast room, seemingly unaware and unfazed by the smells and sounds surrounding her. Minutes later the fire department discovered the source of the smoke: a microwaved tin foil wrapped Hershey’s kiss. I didn’t know how to explain what had happened to the confused and concerned fireman, nor did I find it any simpler when confronting my parents with the story later that day. I myself was attempting to piece together this jagged multi-partite puzzle. I distinctly remember how uneasy my grandmother’s facial expression made me that day, the first glimmer of the coming cracks in our capacity to connect and understand each other. As time and her dementia has progressed, I’ve learned how much of our lives are learned rather than innate, and what the first things to leave us are when our storage ‘boxes’ of implicit and explicit memory are wounded and no longer accessible. I have also learned what endures. In the years since, my family has found solace in the beautifully unexpected ways we have been able to communicate and connect with my grandmother as traditional modes of interaction have become impossible. Visits of song and dance have become our form of post-verbal dialogue. Our shared values of joy and connectedness, and the desire to just be together, have kept us grounded and tightly clasped, even as my grandmother has become so distant and hard to reach.

After breaking that unwrapped Limoges box, all those years ago, I took special precautions not to break any other piece of my collection. If I ever removed a box from the glass display cabinets lining my grandmother’s living room, I would clutch it tightly in my hand before transferring it to rest on the soft rug below. I learned to value what I still had in my collection, counting and examining each and every one at the start and end of our visits, a new private ritual I created to counteract the fragility of what still remained.

Before my most recent visit with my grandmother my parents attempted to warn me what I should expect. “You know she really doesn't talk or communicate anymore. Most of the time she has little awareness of our presence. We just want you to brace and protect yourself.” I found my grandmother in a distant corner of her wing and placed myself on the soft carpet below her wheelchair, so that I could meet her gaze. Because she has lost her ability to connect sight and sound, I made sure to announce myself not just by my words but through direct contact. I was crouched and contorted there when I first noticed a small glimmer of recollection in her eye. “It’s most likely she’s just surprised to see anyone,” I thought, remembering my parents’ warning. I wrapped my hand tight around hers and grazed the curves and edges of her fingers. “It’s so good to see you, Nama. I miss you. I love you.” My grandmother moved her head slightly, solidifying our eye contact. Her eyes widened and she smiled. I knew embedded in her eyes and facial expression were the words she could not speak, that in her own way she was saying “I love you, too, sweetie.” The rest of that visit we continued to exchange our new version of ‘I love you,’ each time my hand grasping hers tighter and tighter so as to not lose this rare and fragile moment of connectedness.

When my grandmother first moved out of her home and into an assisted living facility, I received a box of what once was our small museum, each piece individually swaddled in wrap and tape by the movers. Like a little girl, I ran my fingers over the bubble wrap and packing paper of the few pieces packed at the top of the box, this time alone in my attempt to guess the shape and identity of each bundle, the white wrapping paper and tape suddenly appearing like the bandaging of a multiform wound. Confronting the growing effects of my grandmother’s dementia has taught me a new form of painful acceptance. I know that I cannot fix this. But neither have I been able yet to unpack that moving box and unwrap the precious contents of our museum. Those Limoges boxes remain, as it were, a bandaged but very much open wound, a reminder for me of the kinds of heartbreak that never entirely heal.