Insomnia

My spanish teacher likes to give us clips from stories written by latino authors to improve our reading and to immerse us in the culture. Recently, we read a couple pages from, Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) by Gabriel García Márquez. He is famous for being the best in the genre of realismo mágico (realistic magic). The section we read from One Hundred Years of Solitude is where the village of Macondo succumbs to a plague of insomnia. Besides insomnia, the truly negative effect of the plague is memory loss, similar to Alzheimer's. It begins with the people not remembering the names of objects, then it progresses further to forgetting what they're doing, names of family members and who family is, their past, and their name.

Forgive me for deluding you into thinking that this post is going to be a reflection about One Hundred Years of Solitude. I give it as background because if I dived into what I want to talk about first and then tried to explain about the book along the way, I think it would be too confusing. Anyway, Señora assigned the reading as homework so when we discussed it in class she had to clarify that the people lost their memories because of insomnia (a bunch of us were confused as to what was going on). When she said that, I thought of my grandma.

My paternal grandma has a terrible memory. It's not so bad that she doesn't remember names and faces, but she can't remember where she puts things or what she's done. It's frustrating and frightening because I worry that one day she's going to leave the house with the stove on. She wasn't always like that. My grandma used to be really sharp. She remembered everything. Now, she can't remember what she had for lunch. It's like she's been on a downward spiral ever since my grandpa died. After he died she was very distraught and lonely and I think she lost the desire to do things. She stopped cooking, which was difficult for me because she used to cook these huge dinners and invite my family over and it would be a good happy time. After my grandpa's death we weren't invited to anymore dinners and my grandma spent every day watching t.v. complaining about how bored she was. Then her memory started to go. I couldn't understand it. Why did I have to remind her that today was Friday, not Saturday, every ten minutes? I got frustrated a lot although I hid it. I wanted my grandma back. My Mom and my aunty suspected that the forgetfulness was a result of her taking a sleeping pill, ambien. My grandma is a chronic insomniac so she believes that she has to take ambien otherwise she can't get enough sleep. I started to believe that ambien was the reason why my grandma was so forgetful and it would make me upset when she would tell me how good it was and that it had no side effects.

Today seemed appropriate to talk about this since this afternoon my mom took my sister, my grandma, and me to Times so that my grandma could pick up her medication. I thought it was one of her anti-anxiety medicines, but as the pharmacist handed the little orange container to my grandma, I saw the label, ambien. We brought her back to her house and headed for our home. Before dinner the phone rang and I picked it up. It was my grandma and she said that she thought she forgot to pick up her medication. I told her, You did grandma. I remember standing in line with you. She told me it wasn't in her purse. Again she said, I think I left it at the store. Again I replied, No grandma, you brought it home, I remember taking it off the counter and giving to you as we left. Check the cabinet, you know, the one under the microwave where you keep all your medicine bottles. The last time you forgot where your pills were they were there. She called back a couple minutes later and said that she found her pills. Although I want her to stop taking it, I don't want her to have to suffer every night staring up at her ceiling unable to sleep. I'm not sure where I'm going with this anymore. I guess reading the part from One Hundred Years of Solitude, where insmonia leads to memory loss, was like déjà vu because it seems to parallel the situation with my grandma.