Identity, family, love: What Alzheimer's helped my Japanese American grandmother remember

A month before my grandma went into the intensive care unit for the last time, in the Spring of 2017, I sat next to her in her bedroom she had been confined to for the last decade and listened to her mumble. Half asleep, she peered at me, eyelids heavy.

“No, no, please haha (mama), let’s go home.”

She had believed for a while now that she was a child, still behind barbed wire fences at Japanese American internment Camp Amache, her thick black hair tangled and matted from the harsh desert winds, and her bones bleached from the scorching sun of high noon. 

She hadn’t remembered my name in years, but I took strange comfort in the fact that she thought I was her mother every time she came out of her trance long enough to notice me sitting next to her, scrolling through the newsfeed on my phone and coughing from the smog seeping through her curtains from the San Pedro port in Los Angeles. As a half-Japanese, half-Mexican American, it wasn’t until my grandmother forgot me that she saw me as someone who was just as Japanese as her.

“Please, mama, haha, please, let’s go home," said Midori May Kumamoto.

The burden of Alzheimer's disease 

The last time she remembered who I was, was a decade ago, at the ripe age of 17. The last time my anxious, manic, nisei (child of immigrants from Japan) grandma could say my name, “Akira, granddaughter,” I was applying to colleges, crying over my acne and thin as a rail.

A year later she would fall down the flight of stairs in her aging home in San Pedro into a pile of trash bags brimming with yellowing clothes and stacks of decades-old newspapers that she feared getting rid of, lest she forgot an important date or event. She would, as it often goes with many Alzheimer's patients, enter the hospital with a broken hip, a minor stroke, dehydration, and leave the hospital with no recollection of which direction her favorite East Asian market was or exactly how long it had been since she paid her electric bill.

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A decade later, I sat next to the shell of the woman who had introduced me to my first set of imported Pokémon cards, brought plastic bags to restaurants to collect as many free jellies and butters as she could, and wore long strings of plastic pearls to family parties because they made her feel fancy.

She could no longer function without in-home care, and visiting her was like meeting a 4-year-old every single time. She saw me, a tired, anxious, soft woman who shared her almond eyes and her long, round cheeks, and loved me solely because she was certain I was her mother. And I preferred that to her seeing the decade-aged version of myself who still didn’t know how to feel Japanese enough to connect with her.

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My nisei grandparents were sent to internment camps during World War II, and they left those camps with the fear that if they did not become “less Japanese” they would forever be seen as the enemy. In order to protect themselves, they assimilated their children into white American culture, never teaching them Japanese and insisting they keep their heads down and mouths shut.

My dad married a Mexican American woman, and they had me, a racially ambiguous girl with an identity crisis. My grandma told me often that I was not “too Japanese” looking, and that I didn’t look “too much” like her. She acted as if my existence was proof that she had succeeded, that I would be safe from the anti-Asian sentiments that once destroyed her family’s livelihood and her carefree passion for living. 

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She awoke abruptly from her nightmare and noticed me slouched next to her in her threadbare corduroy recliner. Her black eyes were bloodshot, and spittle dripped down her chin as she stared at me. Her hands began to tremble as she tried to sit up, but her willowy arms could not support her fragile frame.

Carrying the pain of the past 

“Mom, you’re awake!” my dad said as he poked his head up from his nap. He often slept during our visits because it was the only time he had to rest and Grandma was rarely conscious anymore anyway. He scrambled to his feet and waddled across the room to his mother’s bedside. She never once stopped gazing at me, even as my dad wiped the drool off her face with his T-shirt and propped her into a sitting position so she could see her visitors.

My dad never liked his mom. He loved her, but really didn’t like her for as long as I could remember. He was curt with her and had no patience for her shortcomings. He held bitterness toward her for raising him with an iron fist and expecting him to be a good boy when he just wanted to have fun and wreak havoc like most teenagers did. He didn’t like that she didn’t understand Led Zeppelin or American sports, the things that made him cool with the white kids. She just wanted to keep him safe.

He couldn’t fathom why she wouldn’t be as easy going as her husband. His dad was so cool. He played baseball with him, bought him nice clothes, let him do whatever. His dad didn’t let the past define him like his mom did. His mom, my grandmother, blamed the Americans for her father’s suicide, for her husband’s fatal colon cancer, for her destitute childhood in the Colorado desert. And she feared them, feared herself.

His dad, though, never complained about such things, even though he, too, spent his youth behind a fence, fought in wars for a country that betrayed him, and was killed by illness from the smog that blanketed the city he had to live in after his family was forced away from their farmland.

But as he combed her hair and straightened her pajamas, he loved his mom. He held her trembling hand as she fell into a trance, a memory filled with dust and heat and destitute. 

“Mama, let’s go home,” she begged, still looking at me. 

“Mom, you are home,” my dad said.

Akira Olivia Kumamoto is a video producer for Humankind at Paste BN based in Long Beach, California. On the side she writes essays and has been featured in Catapult Magazine, The Rumpus and Lenny Letter's. She's the author of a poetry collection, "When You Get Here."