Grandma says, "My husband is coming back to me"

As a teacher with almost forty years experience. I have seen thousands of students. Among so many of them, though, there are a couple of students who I remember quite well.

Shino was one of them. One day, she came to me and said, "Mr. Tsuji, I would like to make a speech at the English Speech Contest for high school students in Osaka."
I said, "OK, what do you want to talk about?" She said she would talk about her grandmother. Then she told me the following story:

I have a grandmother. She is not tied to me by blood. She brought up my mother as if she were her real daughter. When her husband was put in a hospital, she came to stay with us.

My grandma had to leave us after she developed Alzheimer's, one of today's most serious diseases. My father decided that we could not live in peace if she was with us. So she was moved to a nursing home for older people in Tokyo.

My mother was the only person she could recognize at that time. But from the very moment she was put in the nursing home, she could not tell her mother from anyone else either. Even so, when we went to see her all the way from Osaka, she looked very happy. She talked about her good old days to anybody who came to see her.

"This is a ring my husband gave me."
"My husband took me to many interesting places."
"My husband is a good cook."

I can't tell you well how happy she looked while she was talking about her husband. She didn't know who she was talking to, though.

Always at the end of her monologue, she said, "My husband is coming back to me. That, he promised me." My grandpa had been dead in a hospital long before that.

When Shino told me this, I decided to help her with her speech. She was not great during her rehearsals, but when her turn came in actual competition, she was different. She was so different that I thought her grandma and her grandma's husband were empowering her from beyond. She won the second place. That was ten years ago.

Shino Takase, now 28, lives with her children and her husband in Tokyo. What about the grandma? She is finally with her husband now.