A protracted illness, the will of forgetting

There exist exactly three photographs of my grandfather. One was taken when he was eighty, the other two are of an indistinct, young man’s figure in a crowd. I suppose he deemed it safe to come out into life just as his was about to end. I am told he insisted that his first wife spent three years in a hospital, where she died in 1944. I am told he said she lay there for three years, dying slowly of some illness – an illness that left her paralyzed from the neck down, staring into the ceiling, a head on a stick, a mind locked into the frozen skeleton.