‘The Smell of Screaming’ by Adrienne Gruber

Inhale

When Granny moved into my parents’ house, my mom renovated the upstairs bedroom and moved my dad’s office into the basement. Mom ripped up the carpet and put in laminate flooring. She painted the walls eggshell and had a new window installed. The old one that I used to sneak out of as a teenager was discarded. Granny’s antique furniture was shipped from Ontario, where she had been living with my aunt for the last decade.

The sense of smell comes about through the stimulation of specialized cells in a body’s nasal cavities — cells that are similar to the sensory cells of the antennae of invertebrates. The human olfactory system works when odorant molecules bind to specific sites on the olfactory receptors, which are used to detect the presence of smell.

Over the years that Granny lived with my parents, routines were formed. She’d shuffle into the kitchen with her walker an hour before noon, demanding to know when lunch was served. She’d remind my mom how she took her coffee — “One third coffee, two thirds cream” — as if my mom hadn’t been putting out the same egg salad sandwich and fruit cup and preparing her coffee for the last thousand days.

It all comes together at the glomerulus, a structure that transmits signals to the olfactory bulb — a part of the brain directly above the nasal cavity and below the frontal lobe. The end result is the subjective experience we call smell.

Granny drove us all nuts with her demands and barking orders, her moodiness, her obsessive rituals. Her social interactions were a series of repetitive questions usually directed at my dad, who’d watch sports in the living room as she ate her meals. Where is that game taking place, Klaus? What type of sport is that? Who’s winning? Questions ran on a continuous loop for each person in her life. Her dementia worsened with every year.

When I came home to visit, I swear I could smell it.