My Guardian Angel, My Grandfather

I have been spending the entire summer of my fifteenth year watching my grandfather who has dementia, similar to Alzheimer’s. I have been bored to death. I have thanked God repeatedly for the wonderful invention of internet.
But the thing is that even though I am bored, although my summer has been washed down a drain, that I have learned from this experience.
The thing that really gets me is that people come and look at my grandfather with pity for having dementia. Awww, the poor thing! They crone in dull voices.
But what about me?
Why do you cry tears for him but how do you think I feel to look at him everyday?
To watch as his hearing gets worse?
To watch as things slip his mind more?
Hear more false accusations of others’ wrongdoing spew from his lips?
To watch as he turns to more of a shriveled little man?
He is not the same man who hung up that Little Tyke swing for me in the backyard.
He is not the same man who took me to junk store and me and him played basket ball and got shouted at by my mom.
He is not the same man who bought little trinkets to amuse him and me, old wooden tops and little badly tuned guitars and play with them to a melody that only he knows.
He is not the same man who hated to see me cry and yet I sit here writing this, crying.
But he will never know.
He will never know that it hurts to look at him.
He will never know that I really miss him because he doesn’t even know he is gone.
He will never know just how much I love him although I tell him everyday.
He will never be the same again.
He just doesn’t know it.
And that’s what kills me.
It kills me to look into his blue eyes, those pools that where once so filled with a child-like innocence are now cold and lifeless. Dull.
He is not the one I loved so much.
He is not the one EVERYONE loved so much.
If you haven’t noticed by now most of my poems (Disappear, Death is not Forever, It is Only Goodbye, In His Eyes) about someone who has blue eyes. I’m sorry to say that that is him.
My grandfather.
My pawpaw.
My guardian angel.
God, I love him so much!
I …loved… him.
It is easier for me to think of him as already dead, for he is no longer my pawpaw.
He is a diseased man.
He is gone.
And though a part of the REAL him shows up on rare occasions I know that all too soon he will be gone and the diseased half of him will be back.
I don’t know how much longer I can take being around him.
How much longer I can take looking at him without busting out in tears.
A part of me needs to get away from him for a while.
The other part wants me to stay.
What if he gets lonely?
Who will he call on to point out when a man falls in a horse trough on a western movie that he has seen ten times before but never remembers?
The only thing is that I am lonely too.
I still love him even though he is no longer there.
I still call him pawpaw.
I still stay with him so he had someone to laugh at a funny western movie.
Or to help him guess the answers to Wheel of Fortune.
I can’t leave him.
No matter how much I want or need to.
He is my grandfather.
The one who loved and was loved in return.
No matter how much it hurts.