My grandmother was a careless nurse, a reckless driver, a neglectful guardian, and a laissez faire cult leader. She did everything in the same whirlwind manner. She didn’t edit her books, and she took so little care when painting that all our furniture had drips. “Careful” was not in her expansive vocabulary.
She contributed to at least twelve early deaths, not out of malice, but lack of care in every sense. In surgery, on the road, in the cult, she spread death around her as mindlessly as a flower sheds spores, but with all the agency of a human in her actions. She could have taken more care, drove the speed limit, double checked that all the sponges were out before telling the doctor to stitch the patient up. But she didn’t.
It took me a long time to reconcile her death toll with her seeming lack of interest. Aren’t serial killers supposed to take pleasure in death? But she wasn’t a true serial killer, despite her series of deaths. Her evil was more banal. She didn’t hate the people whose deaths she caused. She just didn’t care if they survived.
She is alive today, with advanced Alzheimer’s, largely kept to her bed, and frequently on a feeding tube. She is periodically transferred to the hospital, when it looks like she won’t last much longer, but she has thus far recovered each time. She is sick and frail in ways I never saw during the cult years, and sh can’t remember the good or the bad.
Sometimes I want to yell at her, to cry and scream and hold her accountable. But I want to yell at the fat and hearty grandma who spanked me with powerful arms, the strong and loud grandma who spoke her racist mind, the intelligent and proud grandma who beat proper grammar into me, not this shriveled simulacrum, not this shell.
I know it is dehumanizing to think of a person as a shell, a not fully human thing, yet that’s what allows me to let her body off the hook for her crimes. Because I can’t hold this old woman, the one needing round the clock nursing care and doesn’t remember her moment as a tyrant, accountable for the sins of the old woman who lived in that body before her. And I can’t forget or forgive those crimes enough to learn to love this new old woman, the one who forgot.
Misandry Angie 