EPTToday I was in Montreal with a friend, and we were making our way to this little winter barbecue party that a few buddies were throwing together for Christmas. Most of us had had the chance of spending xmas eve with our families or at least with people who care about us. On the way there, we stopped at the groceries and I left my friend there, she would get a shitload of meat while I picked up someone else.
As I was leaving the grocery store's parking lot, this old lady, who looked about 80, walked in front of my car. She had winter clothes, but they seemed insufficient - and she had just walked in front of a moving vehicle without really looking or acknowledging that I was there, so I got out of my car and asked her if everything was alright. She smiled and told me that yes, everything was great, but that she needed to get home and she wasn't sure where she was.
I hadn't even taken the time to think about why a woman would be lost in Montreal during the winter, I just kind of assumed everything was ok, and I actually let her into my car - she looked cold, too. Her name was Marie, she was a super nice woman. She started talking about her kids and told me of her husband who had passed many years ago.
Surely she couldn't live too far away anyway, and my GPS would find her house really quickly. I asked her address, which the GPS couldn't find at all. The street didn't exist as far as I can tell. I drove around for some 10 minutes, stopping to google stuff with my phone. She seemed really dumbfounded by the phone's existence, as if she had never seen a smartphone before. It wasn't just that she wasn't familiar with it - it was like she had no clue it even existed.
After driving in circles for a while, looking for the street name, I asked her her address again, and she gave me a different one. That's when I realized that something was off. It took me a surprisingly long time even though I had had a bunch of clues. She looked at the time and told me something like "it's late, George is probably worried". She was talking about her husband.
At this point, my friends were getting annoyed because I had been gone for some 30 minutes and they were waiting for me. Perhaps I was inconsiderate but I made sure to update them about what was taking time. I ended up finding the woman's address, the second one she had given me. When we got there, she told was like in awe at the house like "ooooh, this is where George and I used to live!" as if we had just happened to drive by that house. She had completely forgotten that she had given me the address.
At this point, I asked her to look in her wallet so that we could find her exact address. She had a paper with the info of a nursing home of some description, which seemed to confuse her more than it surprised me. I punched the address in my GPS and got there, it was literally a 1 minute walk from the grocery store where I picked her up. You could see the building from the place where she got in my car.
When I brought her, the people who were working there thanked me and I was pretty much told informally that it wasn't the first time this woman had walked out, and that basically she had been completely abandoned by her kids.
I haven't been able to shake the bitter feeling this left me and I've spent my Christmas with a weight on my chest. My grandma has Alzheimer's. She's still herself but once in a while you can tell something's off - she'll ask the same question 2-3 times in a 5 minutes span. I won't get too much into it, but yeah, it's a scary disease.
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Merry Christmas and take care of your families.
