Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's by Andrea Gillies Read Free Book Online Page A

tour of the outbuildings. The main yard has an L shape of them, incorporating tractor shed, coach house, garage, stables, a quaint row of low outhouses bordering the drying green beyond. The gardens are charming, though romantically gone to ruin, with wide herbaceous borders, extensive shrubbery areas with paths behind, and elephantine hummocks of Escallonia and Hebe . Generations of family dogs and cats are buried in the wood and in the vegetable garden, with headstones and names and dates.
    I take Morris on the tour, too, and we move at his slow, stick-aided pace round the grounds. Morris had been typically gung-ho about the move. He was going to learn to sea fish, and go sailing with Chris. He was going to get one of those electric buggies. He was going to plan and oversee the planting of the kitchen garden. But the truth is that he’s no longer good with outdoors. Outdoors taunts him with everything that he’s lost. His life today consists of the achievement of selfhood through television. Pictorial absorption. Mind meld. A domestic annihilation that invokes Nancy’s presence, perhaps, in healthier and younger days, when all the adult comings and goings of television pictures mirrored their own busy lives, their powers, their choices, and was restfully vicarious. Now it’s as if he disappears down a wormhole out of the present. Nancy’s presence is preferred, the two of them driving the spaceship together, like they did in their heyday at the family house, when they converted a tiny study into a private TV room, two armchairs and a television squeezed into a pod. But now that she’s ill, Nancy isn’t content any longer to sit in her armchair all day with the TV on, and why should she be? There has to be more to life. Even she, standing at the doorway that leads from moderate to severe Alzheimer’s disease, can see that.
    Morris wants to be indoors, and Nancy wants to be out. She comes into the garden with me half a dozen times a day, and every time we go I point out the view. Ordinarily she’ll say “Oh, ye-es,” drawing the word out as if impressed, but her attention flickering. I’m not convinced she really sees it. So I persist. “Look at the next headland, Nancy—do you see the lighthouse?”
    “It’s wonderful. Look at that! And really not very much traffic at all.” She’s pink faced because it’s humid today, and because she isn’t good with the heat.
    She seems to know what I’m thinking. “I’m not good with the heat at all, never have been to be quite truthful.”
    The short-term memory is shot. The long-term memory is failing, but parts of it are still intact. Fewer of these memories—records stored up on the higher ground, the flood waters lapping against their green hillock—present themselves as autobiographical lately, though random instances of likes and dislikes remain, and rise casually to the surface at unexpected moments.
    “You’re hot. Maybe you should take some of your cardigans off, then,” I tell her.
    She looks down, holds her arms out from her body. “Oh. Yes. I didn’t think of that.”
    I help her to take the three extra ones off. But when I see her a few minutes later she’s got them all on again, and is just in the act of buttoning the top one, badly and askew.
    W ITHIN A FEW short weeks we fall into a sort of pattern that we should probably call a life. It’s my in-laws’ life, at least. The challenge for us is not to let it be all of ours. For now, there is optimism. The new life is full of structure. Structure and comforting sameness, that’s what The Book says Nancy needs, and I am, at least for now, keen to do things by The Book. We get Nancy and Morris up once the children are off to school, put them back to bed at night when Morris is ready, and in between the days unfold almost identically. Only meals remind them of the time—meals and the television, their lives parceled out in programming. The day begins with the delivery of breakfast to their