Now that his grandmother has dementia and lives on a ward, John Reed has finally confronted his memories of growing up with her and concluded that all the people and animals that died around her were probably deliberately poisoned, and that's why whenever he'd visit her and eat her weird "health food," he'd fall asleep for days at a time, sometimes waking up in a hospital with near-fatal breathing problems.
I have no idea whether any of this is true (it's all pretty outlandish), but it's wonderful writing.
So the question became: How did we explain to guests, outsiders, that they shouldn't eat grandma's food? One time, maybe on Passover, my brother brought his new girlfriend, an actress. Grandma had promised not to prepare anything, and it seemed she'd kept her word, so we didn't mention the poisoning thing to the girlfriend, but after we'd eaten lunch, Grandma came out of the kitchen with these oatmeal raisin cookies that looked terrible. They were bulbous, like the baking soda had gone haywire. My brother's girlfriend ate two of them, maybe out of politeness. We looked on, aghast. She had a rehearsal in the city, but she passed out on the couch and missed it.
So why would Grandma poison us? Well, for some time, my mother has postulated that Grandma has Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a condition that causes caregivers to poison or injure their charges. Me? I'm sure that Grandma wasn't trying to hurt anyone. If she slipped you a Mickey it was because she didn't want you to leave—she loved to make people miss their train. "Stay the night, stay the night," she'd coo.
Other times, Grandma's concerns seemed more practical. My mother, when she moved back to Grandma's for a brief time, had many pets—turtles, dogs, hamsters, cats—that successively took ill and died. And there was Joe, the ex-paratrooper who was Grandma's last boyfriend. He got into the habit of blowing his pension checks in Atlantic City and mooching off Grandma until the next check arrived. Then he got a broken leg and we got all these hysterical calls from Grandma saying she was forced to wait on him hand and foot—and then he was dead.
My Grandma the Poisoner [John Reed/Vice]
(via Kottke)
(Image: Matt Rota)
