Best Of Horror Urban Legends

Suffered from dementia

Grandpa was 97 years old when he passed away.

He lived far from where his three children had settled. Grandma died when I was a small child, and he ended up remarrying another woman a few years later who demanded that he move out west so that she could be nearer to her sons. She was a piece of work, her name was now Grandma Hester. We all wondered how Grandpa could stand her. It turns out that perhaps he could not.

We're not precisely sure when he developed dementia, but it was probably years before we noticed it. He'd tell us about people he was speaking to, or visiting with, or a trip he took. Years later, after we learned he was suffering from dementia, we'd learn that conversation, that visit or that trip never actually happened. For all we really know, any story he told us from the last decade and a half leading up to his coming back east could be a false memory. We would have no way of knowing. Hester rarely communicated with us herself.

Probably our first clue that Grandpa wasn't himself anymore happened a few weeks after he came back east to live with my parents. Most of the family had settled in one area; my wife and I lived in the south end of our city, as did one set of cousins, but my father and his two sisters all lived in the north, within driving distance of each other. A few of my aunts' children had moved out of town, and my brother had as well, but there were still enough of us around that Grandpa could visit with. We would often have gatherings at my parents' house where Grandpa would either hold court with some story or would go to sleep.

One afternoon, my daughter Breanne, who was in her late teens at the time, came in from playing with my cousin's kids and sat down at the table, where Grandpa had been napping. He suddenly woke and smiled at her.

"Well, hello, Claudia!" he said, brightly. Claudia was my aunt; Dad's youngest sister.

"I'm Breanne, Grandpa," said my daughter.

"No," said Grandpa, almost sounding offended. "You're my daughter, Claudia."

Later that same month, he told my aunts and uncles the story of how he came out east after living with Hester got to be too much. "I prayed to the Lord," said Grandpa. "And the next thing I knew, Martin was there." Martin was my father. I remembered him driving out to the tiny, cold house on a hill in Colorado to get Grandpa. He had not come due to any divine intervention. He had come because Grandpa called him in the night and pleaded with him to come get him.

We all loved Grandpa, but caring for him was not easy. For one thing, Grandpa had gotten it into his head that he was a young, single man with many years ahead of him, and the only thing missing was a young woman at his side. If he spoke for any length of time with a younger woman, he became convinced that she was in love with him, and that perhaps she should be his new bride. Hester was even still alive at this point. He had forgotten her utterly.

The women he made advances on included my mother, two of my cousins and my own wife. Thankfully, he couldn't do much more than talk, so it was just a matter of politely changing the subject whenever he would start with that, but it got worse when he decided he could do things like take walks on his own or try to drive my father's car.

Dad and Mom didn't let him go on walks by himself, but that didn't mean he didn't sneak away sometimes when Dad was away and Mom was in the basement. He had to use a walker to get around, and simply couldn't do stairs, but refused to admit this to anyone, including himself, leading to a lot of falls. He would also get confused as to where he was, or where he lived. At times, during his walks, he would attempt to find the old family home that he raised my father and aunts in, despite it having been long gone since before I was born. Dad picked him up from a police station, where he had been taken after some patrol officers saw him wandering around, clearly lost.