Douglas Allen Rhodes

My Grandma once called my mom
convinced that she was dying
of AIDS.
She wasn’t,
but it was 1987 and
the disease was still new
and shiny
and horribly attractive
to a hypochondriac.

She wasn’t a very nice woman,
my Grandma.
She was always angry,
and wanted everybody
to worry about her,
and when my mom was little,
she had let my Grandfather,
who I never met,
do awful things to her.

She moved in with us,
right before I left
for the Marines,
when she was diagnosed
with Alzheimer’s,
and my mom took care of her,
right up until the end,
when she was little more
than a husk
of the mean old woman
who’d always had Cancer,
or Diabetes, or AIDS.

Years later,
when I was home on leave,
my mom showed me where
she kept the box of ashes
that had once been my Grandma,
and she laughed as she told me
it was sad,
that Grandma’s mind had gone;
because, she would have loved
having Alzheimer’s.