Jack, as a school girl, was a spelling bee champion. This skill served her well when she began to play Scrabble. She was a champion at that, too, and a fierce competitor. After dementia began to set in, she was genuinely surprised if one of us happened to make a higher score than she did, and somewhat offended. And she would cheat. Drawing letters from the pile, we often caught her looking for certain letters, rather than taking the first ones she chose. Her decline at the Scrabble board corresponded with her general decline. She played very few Scrabble games after we moved her to Jackson in 1998.

We’ve noticed since she’s been in the hospital, that she is stuck in spelling mode. Today it was S-T-A-I-S-T. I tried guessing the word she was working on, but she just repeated the same nonsensical string of letters. Was she enjoying the sound of the letters, was she remembering a spelling bee? Maybe she was imagining a rack of Scrabble letters and trying to make a word of them. Who knows?

We’ve also noticed that the t.v. stations she pays the most attention to are the ones with news copy on the screen that she can read aloud. I turned on the captions on an old movie, and she read lines aloud for about 10 minutes. That seemed to make her very tired, so she closed her eyes and went to sleep. That’s when we slipped out of the room and came home.

Dr. Krooss came by while we were there, said he would never have predicted so little pain with the kind of surgery she had. She still has not admitted to any pain except when the nurse changed her bandage, and that was about the tape. I tried to keep her distracted by giving her words to spell, N-U-R-S-E, H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L, M-I-K-E, V-A-N-C-E, B-A-B-Y. And I told her again about her brand new great granddaughter. That made her S-M-I-L-E.