The smell of urine and Mr.Clean clogged the white tiled hallways.  I dreaded visiting the home every Sunday after lunch. He lived in a place that smelled of ripe cucumbers and pine trees once.  He was strong then. Six and a half feet of street boxer.  Three and a half pounds of banker gray matter under a carpet of wavy blonde hair.  A smart mountain of a man who never stopped talking and never stopped moving.

As a child I rarely saw my father’s father indoors.  He walked his few acres of land incessantly, measuring the water level of the pond my father had built for him in college, tilling up a wilted crop and seeding a new one, pulling ripe tomatoes or green beans from their vines.  Always in filthy work boots and a jumpsuit, the kind mechanics wear.  Always fending off some critter trespassing through his patch of utopia.

At eighty-seven Grandaddy took after a squirrel having lunch in his pecan tree.  He loved his pecan tree.  He hated squirrels. He grabbed a ladder.  And a shotgun.  He stood the ladder on an old washtub, rusted through and about as strong as my grandfather’s foresight at that moment.

The squirrel got away and my grandfather got launched from his perch when the trigger was squeezed.  A few broken ribs and a heart attack later the family decided Grandaddy needed to live in a place without varmints or firearms – a place with white tiled hallways that smelled like urine and Mr. Clean.

His brain was beginning to struggle to hold onto reality before the move.  Without the familiar sights and smells of home to anchor his memories though his progression toward letting go of it altogether sped.

Some days were good.  He knew my name.  He’d tell a story about a man he once boxed in an alley or about the day he held my grandmother’s hand for the first time at a church dance – her card was full but how could she turn him down?

But there were fewer and fewer days like these. The disease that shrank his playground from a few acres to a nursing home room worked on his mind until his entire world was whittled down to a single hospital bed.  Someone was always there to remind when he’d forget.

“It’s me, David, your son.  You’re in a hospital, Daddy.  You’re sick.  You’re in a hospital, Daddy.”

Tonight I read about a new finding in the study of Alzheimer’s Disease – a gene that seems to be the source of the illness.  Those born with the gene in essence have always had the disease – always – not just when symptoms increase to the point of being noticeable.  And the man who wrote the article feels the likely always will, though some symptoms, he’s hopeful, will be all but eradicated with intense and expensive treatments available soon.

This has me thinking about a lot of things – about weakness and sin and all those other “poor in spirit” words.  I’m in the habit of forgetting I’m sick.  I always have been.  Not just when the symptoms present themselves.  The last couple days though I feel as if God has been tending to me, sitting on the bedside when I come to with a confused look on my face.  “Why did I do that?  Why am I stuck like this?  What’s wrong with me?  Why can’t I do this right?” He squeezes my hand and waits for the litany of questions from the perfectionist in me to subside, then leans forward and whispers the grounding truth.  “You’re sick.”

I remember.