My grandmother was in her mid-forties when I was born. She was a simple woman. She was raised to be a housewife and mother, and that is what she was. I am not even sure she had more than a grade-school education as it was not common back then. I remember from growing up the expectation for my grandmother was to raise children, cook, clean, do laundry and shopping for the family. She never worked outside of the house that I ever knew. One of my fondest memories of her was that she made the best tasting mashed potatoes that I knew, and I would always try to figure out her secret, I think it was the love that she put into everything.
It wasn’t until middle childhood that we lived close enough to my grandparents that we were able to visit them a lot. We would go to visit them at least 2-3 times a month and make the 2-and-a-half-hour drive to where they were living at the time. My grandmother would have been in her mid-fifties by then. Back then I was not sure if any of my family knew about Huntington’s running in our family, but I don’t ever remember being told about it back then. They may have known, but no one talked about it, at least not to me. I vaguely remember hearing that one of my grandmothers’ relatives, maybe an uncle of hers, had Huntington’s and died at a young age of it.
My very first memory of anything different in my grandmother was probably in my early teens, when my grandmother would have been in her late fifties by then noticing a facial twitch, she had but I thought nothing about it. As my grandmother started to progress through her sixties, I started to notice that grandmother would on occasion do an extended arm twist movement and yelp or yip after doing it. None of these movements interfered with her ability to perform her activities of daily living. She was able to cook, clean, do laundry and take care of the house as she always had been. She lived in a one-story house so didn’t have to manage stairs. At times she would lose her balance and fall, and she was just brushing it off as not being born graceful.
I don’t remember any mental changes in my grandmother back then; she didn’t seem to forget things or not be able to do her wife and motherly duties. My parents and grandparents would play cards games together. I can’t say that I really remember any mental decline at that time. She always seemed to be engaged in what was going on and contributed to the conversation.
