In the spring of 2000, while completing his degree in psychology at the University of Vienna, Alexander Batthyany received an unusual call from his mother. She had just gotten off the phone with Batthyany’s grandmother. “I do not know what happened — but you should call,” his mother told him. “Somehow, she’s back again.” Batthyany was confused: His grandmother, who lived in a nursing home in Switzerland, had vascular dementia and, for the past year, had hardly been able to speak — let alone pick up the phone and initiate a conversation, as his mother claimed had just occurred.
Doubting his mother’s story, Batthyany nevertheless said he would call. He dialed his grandmother’s number. When she answered, it was in the refined, elegant German he remembered her speaking in his childhood. In shock, he found himself wanting to shout: Oh, you can talk!
His grandmother greeted him affectionately. She told him that for the past few months, she hadn’t really been herself. She had been, she said, “very, very, very tired.”
At the sound of his grandmother’s voice, memories came back to Batthyany, flashes of things they did together when he was a boy: hiking in the Alps, skiing trips in St. Moritz, a visit to the famed puppet theater of Geneva. His grandmother remembered it all. For 10 minutes, they reminisced in what Batthyany called “the most lovely conversation.” Almost whispering, his grandmother told him, “You brought so much joy to our lives.” This was his grandmother — gentle, caring, warm — the same as he knew her before she fell ill. But as the call ended, he sensed beneath the joy a painful finality — that this conversation would be their last. Several days later, his grandmother died. ...
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