Written 11 April 2024.
Update: Nenek passed away on 18 August 2024.
I’ve always known her as old.
How old, no one knows.
When I first met her ten years ago,
I was told she was in her 70s.
But that can’t be.
Back then,
she walked bent,
with a limp,
in frequent pain.
Each year,
the bend grew a little deeper,
the limp a little harder,
the pain a little stronger,
until one day
she fell
and never got up again.
She hasn’t left her mattress
for five years now.
Every time I see her,
a little more of her is gone—
a little control of her body,
a little hearing,
a little memory.
When the dementia first began,
she was haunted by a traumatic memory:
the pool of blood on the floor
when the Japanese slaughtered
her first husband in their bedroom
while she lay hidden,
pregnant,
beneath the bed.
The Japanese occupation ended in 1945.
They married young in those days—
mere children by our standards—
but she was old enough to be pregnant.
She must be in her 90s.
It’s been a long time
since I heard her tell that story.
Advancing dementia
has freed her from that trauma.
She mutters now
of more childlike things.
I lived with her and her family once,
but she remembers me no more.
Today, she asked if I, a white foreigner,
was the daughter
of the elderly Javanese woman beside me,
her own sister-in-law,
who she did not know.
She sleeps beside her daughter now,
and cries the tears of a frightened child
any time she is left alone.
Her daughter feeds and bathes and changes,
translates her babbling speech for visitors,
does all that she can.
Today, she tells her who I am,
and the woman next to me.
Several times.
She can’t hold onto it
for more than a few minutes.
Even her eyes have begun to close,
partly swollen shut with age.
It’s hard to watch,
this slow reversal,
mother become daughter,
growing more and more infant-like
until one day she returns
to the womb.