On my grandma’s last birthday, I brought her a scoop of vanilla ice cream. She told me to come back the next day with more ice cream, as I had forgotten her real birthday and celebrated a day too early. I knew for a fact that her birthday that year was on Christmas Day, as it had been every year since 1926. I blamed this episode on her worsening dementia. Regardless, I decided to try again the next day, with a hopeful scoop of ice cream and an even more hopeful attempt at convincing my geriatric grandmother that it was, in fact, her birthday. Four days later and many more naive scoops of ice cream later, I realized my grandmother’s dementia might have made her a genius.

My grandma had racist tendencies, as was common of the many white women her age throughout history. She would ask about “the dog in the Thai food” and comment on why so many of her caretakers “didn’t speak her language” when they spoke to her in thick accents. Her language was that of privilege but, of course, you don’t try to explain to a woman of her age and diagnosis that you know more about her character than she does.

On the last day I visited her, we sang church hymns. She no longer knew my name, but did know every word to “Amazing Grace” and “How Can I Keep From Singing.” I’ve spent thousands of dollars in the higher education system studying the aging mind, yet have no answers as to why the close-minded, crinkled pages of The Church of Christ songbook kept open the doors of her brain’s folds.

My life flows on in endless song;
Above earth’s lamentation,
I hear the sweet, though far-off hymn
That hails a new creation

When she passed away, I was across the country, alone in a city of strangers. I did not fly home, but did distribute the stems of a bouquet to passersby on a busy street, desperate for human connection. In the days that followed, my family did not have a funeral. We would, however, wait several more months, pick up her box of ashes – packaged less carefully than some Amazon packages – and mix the grains of her old body into the wet, dark, cool sands of an empty Miami Beach. I would step into the water with what was left of her. I would watch the smallest foams of sea swirl around my toes and wonder to myself, “What separates me from the others – those who have passed and those who live on, those who have fought the crashing waves of time and those who have treaded without losing their breath?”

Through all the tumult and the strife,
I hear that music ringing

I’ve found that as a young liberal woman in a young liberal town, stories of your racist grandparents aren’t great centerpieces at the dinner table of youthful activism. What does catch attention is the story of the time your grandmother, with ninety years and some lengthy exposure to memory loss, forgot she was a racist. I intentionally phrase that statement this way in order to add drama to the storytelling, but theatrics aren’t particularly necessary. What is important to the story is that my straight, white, integration-fearing grandmother had a regular nurse who was a charming man of color. I used to not believe in past lives or future lives, but dementia has proven to me that anything is possible. For my grandma, this man was not an attendant to her healthcare. She insisted that I believed him to be her boyfriend – the man who remembered her favorite fruit for dessert, the man who shared the “intimate” moments of dressing her, the man who was kind to her in the way she hadn’t felt in years.

Against all odds, my racist grandmother had fallen for a black man!

Imagine my surprise, as I had cautiously hidden from her that I was dating a black man, only to find out that her age-adjusted mind thought she was dating a black man too!

It finds an echo in my soul
How can I keep from singing?

While we never had the chance to talk about these thoughts of ours in any sensible way, I do wonder what her mind had become towards the end.
She didn’t know me or her racism.
She didn’t know her daughter or her own birthday.
But I’d like to think she knew something.

Perhaps the old, memory-lapsed version of her would have liked to try new foods, adopt new views, make new friends with her next-door neighbors with dark skin and light, grey hair. Perhaps she would look at me today, if only in the thoughts I dream of on my most optimistic nights, and join me in singing the hymns of the streets…

Which side are you on my people
which side are you on?

I wonder what she would think of the world today.
Maybe she wouldn’t think of it at all.
Maybe she would’ve forgotten everything that told her to hold back from a world of change. Maybe she would sit up from her hospital bed unassisted, march with a shiny, red walker that might as well be a Cadillac, enter the predictable living room with the distinct long-term-care odor and the confused 1970s decor placed purposefully in the building renovated in 2006.
Maybe she would grab the remote from the old white man, start a television revolution, switch Dr. Oz to Oprah and Pat Sajak to Steve Harvey and Fox News to CNN.
Maybe she would be the person she used to hate,
And maybe she would smile, as if celebrating the birthday she forgot to have.

Which side are you on my people
which side are you on?
We’re on the freedom side!

– Allie Stewart