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My grandmother suffers from dementia. I could say that her sense of reality is unstable, but that would be misleading. It is more that her sense of reality is unbound from time and space. When she looks at me, she sees me, and she sees my mother. She remembers that I am married and then she asks when I am getting married. She reaches for my hand and, when she touches it, recoils with a cry that my skin is “so cold.” A few minutes later, she reaches for my hand again.
From an early age, my life has been defined by people with loose grasps on the world around them. At my other grandmother’s funeral, my uncle spent much of his eulogy recalling his vivid—perhaps too vivid—memories of being born. The principal of my Christian high school regularly attributed world happenings—terrorist attacks, presidents elected or not elected, the price of gas—to unseen spiritual warfare. When I was thirteen, I worried I was being stalked by a demon and, when I shared these suspicions with the woman in charge of my Bible study group, she didn’t say I was imagining things. She just started to pray.
