Chapter 4: Faded
Up here in the attic is an old cardboard box – easily overlooked if you were unaware of it's content. No longer brown, but slightly gray from age and worn down – the mocking comparison of its owner.
A woman who was once of great stature and respect – reduced to a woman with graying skin and fine wisps of hair thinning atop her head. Eyes no longer shining or pigmented with the brilliance of green, but dull and colorless. This was the woman she was now. A sad imitation for what she used to be – a shell of the woman who once was.
She comes up here often – because in this box is a device to turn back time. A way to reflect on what was and to think about how things could have been.
Relda Grimm climbs the steps to the attic unsteadily and slow – fighting through the pain in her knees because she is aware that they are not as strong as they used to be. She sits on the floorboards and squints through the small filtered lines of light to reach out for the box sagging from age. She feels around and pulls out the solitary item that this box contains – a book thick and dense, but the weight and solidness of it brings her strength her body forgot that it had.
She smiles at the photo album cover lovingly and retraces the cursive "G-R-I-M-M" with her finger, removing the dust that has sunken into the golden ridges. Relda opens it and see's where the pages are wearing away from her fingers flipping through them, and how the pictures are losing their colors.
The sudden tightening in her chest makes her gasp, and her long, skinny fingers clutch the book tighter. The pictures are fading. Everything is just fading, fading, fading….
Just like her memory. The people she loves and the memories she cherishes are harder to remember. Memories are accompanied with blurred edges and a sheen of fog is casted over the faces in her head. Her alzheimer's is eating away at her mind.
She looks down at the album once again, there are two young boys there. Building a sandcastle, with their blonde heads thrown back in euphoric laughter. She knows this picture today. A couple of days ago she wasn't sure – but today she remembers – they are her sons. But she is not quite sure which one is Jacob and which one is Henry.
She flips the page again, and it's the wedding picture of her granddaughter, Sabrina. She remembers her. A beautiful blonde with cake shoved in her face by a handsome man with blonde curls and emerald eyes. She can't quite remember his name. Surely she knows, because she is in the background of the picture smiling and clapping. But her mind brings no memories to accompany the picture.
She flips and flips for hours. Some pictures bring memories and names she recognizes. Others she cries because she cannot remember. And then she finds a picture that makes her stop in her tracks. The one person she is most afraid to lose to her illness.
A picture of her and a man – he was skinny and tall. Slightly old, with small dots of gray in his hair and beard. Basil. Her darling, Basil. She smiles a sorrowful grin, because for now she can remember. But as she fingers the edges of the picture, it is thin. The picture wearing away into nothing. The black and white colors fading into gray and brown. Soon the picture will be gone - soon she will not be able to remember him at all. She won't be able to recall the adventures they had, or the family they had built. Just fading.
But she is grateful, because for now she remembers him – which is more than she can say for other members of her family.
"I am fading, Basil. Just like the picture I hold of you now," she whispers to the image as she plucks a kiss onto the face of her love from the past. "But we will be together soon." she vows as she closes the book and places it back into the box – until she needs another look back into her forgotten past.