SPEAK
Save the last dance
How learning to let go taught me what it means to hold on
By Brianne Pfannenstiel
bpfannenstiel@kansan.com
I don't remember much about the way my grandmother was before she developed Alzheimer's. My memories of her are tarnished by the disease and by her slow decline. I don't remember my grandmother cooking Thanksgiving dinner, but I remember how awful I felt when she couldn't anymore. I don't remember her coming to watch my junior high band concerts, but I remember how disappointed I was when she couldn't tell me what instrument she played when she was young. I remember the way I felt when she couldn't remember my name anymore, and then the way I felt when she couldn't remember me at all.
As the Alzheimer's took over, she slowly began to lose everything. It started with words. She would wake up in the morning and words like "kitchen" and "stove," which had been the foundation of her vocabulary for years, were suddenly and mysteriously absent. The kitchen had always belonged to her. It was her refuge and she was protective of it, but she began to gradually forfeit pieces of it to the disease. After "kitchen" and "stove" were gone, "cheese" and "spoon" and "coffee" were quick to follow, until just being in the kitchen frustrated and confused her.
She lost how to say "I love you" and she lost "Brianne," and then she lost what those words even meant in the first place. She started to forget the people and the places and the stories that had brought her to that point in her life, I watched, powerless, as the foundation of a lifetime of memories crumbled and then collapsed. I watched as the Alzheimer's slowly blurred the lines of her memory, before erasing them altogether. Seventy-five years of memories vanished, one by one, as if they had never even happened.
My grandmother slipped further and further away from reality until she barely resembled the strong, caring individual we had all grown up admiring. But there was one thing my grandmother never did lose. Up until the end, my grandmother remembered how to dance. When there was nothing left except broken sentences and confusion—when she had lost everything else—my grandmother never let go of dancing.
My grandparents spent years dancing together. Their family had always been musical, but it wasn't until after their four children had grown up and moved away that they started attending the monthly dances at the Scott County American Legion, or traveling the 40 minutes to Garden City to two-step the night away.
Dancing was a tradition they continued right up until the end of my grandmother's life. Alzheimer's would cause her to throw irrational fits of anger, and only dancing could calm her down. My grandpa would calmly
take her hands in his,lead her around the living room and patiently wait for her anger to subside.
One Thanksgiving, a year or two before she died, the whole family was gathered around the piano after dinner, and my uncles—never able to pass up a good jam session—pulled out their respective instruments and started up some traditional, old-time, two-steppin' music. My grandmother stood up, a little unsure at first, but after my grandpa took her hand, everything seemed to fall into place. My uncles threw in an extra verse as grandpa and grandma took a couple turns around the living room, and for a few brief minutes, we had her back with us. There was such a simple moment of beautiful recognition in the way she hummed the melody and shuffled her feet with the music, like it was completely natural.
It seemed odd to me. Of all the things left at the end of her life, of all the loves and losses and joys and tears, what was it about dancing and music that stayed with her? At the end of a lifetime, what is it that we are all going to be left with? What will endure?
Science would explain it as a simple matter of long versus short-term memory. It might throw around words like "neurotransmitters" and "synapses," but for my family, it's something more than that. Dancing was the very last tie my grandmother held to her past and to us. It was something that we could all hold on to, and it was something that let
hold on to, and it was something that let us smile and remember her for the life she had led, not just for her disease.
At her funeral, my grandpa chose two songs to be played. The piano player addressed the crowd that had assembled and told us that these were two of the oddest songs she had ever been asked to play for a funeral, but at the request of my grandpa, she would play them completely up to tempo—nothing slow or sad. We all sat, smiling to ourselves as the sounds of "Rock Around the Clock" and "The Maple Leaf Rag" echoed from the baby grand and reverberated around the tiny church. It was a tribute to the thousands of miles my grandparents had traveled across the dance floor during
their time together. We all sat quietly, tapping our toes to the last strains of the rag, remembering my grandmother for the one thing she could never forget.
Contributed Photos
(From top) Brianne on her birthday with her grandmother before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's; Brianne with her grandparents at Scott County Lake; Brianne's grandparents share a dance at Thanksgiving in November 2005; Briane and her grandmother holding Brianne's newborn brother, Joke.
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