i refuse to change

i have discovered that i'm really quite stubborn. all of me is (anyone in my family could verify that), but my heart is, too. first off, i refuse to stop loving someone once i feel love for them. it doesn't matter how much i may grow to despise their personalities later-not how much a person may hurt me and chisel away at my happiness. once there is love, it sticks. that's all there is to it.
but there is another part of me that is stubborn in the strangest way. i refuse to change how i remember people in my head. once i get a mental image, well... it's tough to make it go away. take yesterday. i called my parents on my mom's mobile phone. they were at the nursing home visiting my paternal grandmother. she is very sick with alzeimers and, as i remember, the last time i wrote about her, time had taken away the yiddish she learned as a child. since then, sadly, time has taken away most of her words and her faculties. she now eats mostly liquids because there is a possibility she may forget to properly chew and choke herself. often, she just repeats one sound over and over again until it has lost all meaning, if it ever had one. each time i see her or talk to her, i am surprised, because that is not the woman i know-not the one i remember, anyway. each time they put me on the phone with her (i can hear them in the background saying "put that to your ear" so she knows what to do) i am crushed down to the very insides of my soul until i hang up and then the memory reverts back to the original. i do not see this broken woman whose deteriorating body is so much more healthy than the mind. i see a porcelain-faced woman of amazing intelligence holding her chin high in quiet dignity. i see her dancing with my grandfather at a formal party, her silver hair pulled into neat waves framing her face. i don't know who this woman is that doesn't recognize my voice or my face. the one who mistakes my father for her husband. the one who forgets she can't walk and tries to pull herself out of her wheelchair. who is this woman? i refuse to change my memory of her. i just can't do it. maybe it's selfish, or stubborn... or maybe i'm doing her a justice. maybe i'm just doing myself a justice.