Missing Pieces
On dementia, family, and puzzles 🧩
2024 is the year I fell in love with puzzles.
Every morning I do Wordle, Connections, the Mini, and Strands.
I scour Value Village for the best 1000-piece sets.
I still think about this train I did over the holidays with two missing pieces:
Through it all, I try to enjoy the process and not obsess about keeping my brain sharp.
It takes everything not to panic when I can’t immediately recall a name, date, or detail.
I am terrified that genetics will catch up with me.
Not that there will ever be enough “purple first” days to stave off Alzheimer’s… but a girl can hope.
I spent Father’s Day weekend visiting my grandmother with late-stage dementia.
My mom and I sat with her for a few hours each day, trying to make the time as normal and not-depressing as possible.
It was, in a way, similar to the Sunday mornings I had growing up: three generations of women chatting with television in the background.
Only my grandmother had nothing to say — could barely stay awake.
Everything I’ve read about dementia sounds like a broken puzzle.
A life fragments into a million out-of-order pieces that become harder and harder to fit together.
Some become impossible to identify without context.
Others get completely lost.
Over time you forget that there ever was a larger picture with edges and a story. It’s all one big pile of parts that doesn’t really amount to anything.
Watching my grandmother try and fail to put details in place is devastating. She’ll pick up a sentence only to let it fall back into the jumbled mess.
More and more she abandons the exercise altogether.
We used to talk for hours about the news and books and pop culture and fashion and who was or wasn’t on The View.
Now she stares, unresponsive, into nothing.
When the conversation became too hard too sad too empty too unnevering, my mom and I wheeled her to the community puzzle.
There, my mom and I slotted pieces together in silence.
A bit of a flower.
The edge of a pot.
The profile of a dog, who, in any other scenario my grandmother would say looks just like her dog.
Piece after piece we dissociated a little more, keeping each other company while focusing on a jumbled mess we could solve.
It was almost impossible to leave without finishing.
It was almost impossible to leave knowing my grandmother would forget we were ever there.
By Sunday we had resolved to finish the puzzle.
It gave us something to look forward to — A tangible output in a visit that would otherwise be lost.
I had to remind myself to be grateful that I could see my grandmother at all. She had a bad fall in November, and I rushed home with a black dress in my suitcase.
No one expected that she’d still be around today. The last time I left, I contemplated leaving my funeral clothes at my mom’s house.
It would have been easier if that had been the end. The longer she holds on, the more painful it is.
I’ve been thinking about her in the past tense for years - my grandmother used to love shopping. We used to talk on the phone. She used to tell me about new dishes she wanted to try…
It’s easier to separate who she used to be from the person I visit at the home. It allows me to forget how much she hates it there.
How much time she spends confused.
How unhappy she would be to know what her life is like now.
The cruellest part about dementia is how it’s trapped me between appreciating the extra time and wishing my own grandmother dead.
There’s no easy way to slot those thoughts together.
So I focused on the puzzle instead.
My mind wandered to Father’s Day.
In elementary school, the second week of June meant kitschy “to my dad” poems glued onto construction paper cars, shirts, and briefcases.
I would scribble “uncle” or “grandpa” over my copy, ruining the rhyme scheme and inviting questions from fellow second-graders.
They reminded me that everyone else had a dad. It was weird that mine was missing. Who lives with their grandmother, anyway?
I learned words like “biological” and “technically” to help fill in the pieces.
They learned words like “bastard” and “unwanted.”
Those terms became part of how I understood my family's makeup. There was always a person lacking.
Back then it never occurred to me that anyone without the titles “mom” and “dad” could be a parent. I didn’t think my grandmother was anything else but my grandmother.
As an adult, I’ve thought more about her impact on my upbringing. I see how she filled the role of a second parent. I recognize a lot of her in myself.
It’s one thing to know something theoretically - this is a bit of sky or part of the garden - it’s another to watch exactly how the piece fits into place.
Maybe nothing was ever missing. Maybe I was focused on the wrong reference photo.
Maybe this is more like losing a parent than I’m allowing myself to realize.
On my last day in Ottawa, my mom and I decided not to visit again. We hadn’t finished the puzzle, but we needed a break.
We went paddling.
We went shopping.
We picked up a new puzzle for just the two of us.
When we got home, a nurse called to let my mom know that my grandmother wasn’t well.
She had had a bad day.
She wouldn’t stop crying.
She kept asking the attendant to hold her.
She kept saying she didn’t want to be here anymore.
We debated whether visiting would have made a difference. It might have helped, or it might have subjected us to more pain.
It’s horrible knowing that my mom is shouldering so much of this alone. As a caretaker, she can’t distance herself the way I have. She is constantly bearing witness to my grandmother’s decline - not wanting to leave her alone, hating to see her like this.
It’s even more horrible thinking this could be the way we both die. This tragedy runs in our genetics. Our whole family will have to endure this same kind of guilt.
We spent the rest of the night working on our new puzzle - a bunch of canoes docked next to a mountainscape. Hours slipped by.
We chatted.
We zoned out.
We made peace with the fact that we weren’t going to finish this one either.
I wasn’t sure how to cram all these moments together in an essay that makes sense.
Writing is, often, sticking together a million little fragments and hoping the end picture is clear.
After I got home, I found a missing puzzle piece that our cat had knocked under the carpet. It wasn’t from the train, but an English cottage scene I had done in the winter.
In the moment, I had given up on finishing that puzzle.
I didn’t take a picture of it.
I unceremoniously put it away, thinking I had taken everything I could from the activity.
But, sometimes, the pieces turn up when the puzzle is over.
In Summary
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