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

sitting room. Morris announces his arrival and his readiness for the teapot by means of several penetrating coughs. He’ll stay there all day, politely accepting lunch and supper like a passenger on a long-haul flight. They’ve elected to eat all their meals there, on lap trays with padded bases.
    Nancy will sit down for short periods, but the rest of the day she follows me around. She comes with me to walk the dogs in the morning, dawdling along and bending to look at things like a young child does.
    “Don’t pick that up, Nancy. It’s dirty.”
    “What are you talking about? It’s perfectly clean.”
    She brings sticks home, the tops of ineptly picked flowers, sprigs of dried grass, a stone, a leaf she liked the look of, and puts them on the table. Within five minutes, she’ll be complaining about them—“Who left these horrible things here?”—and ferrying them individually to the wastepaper basket.
    After the dog walk, we come in and have a cup of tea and deliver one to Morris with cake. Cake’s become a big part of the day. The dishwasher’s kept busy with teacups, and I am learning to measure out my life in coffee spoons. The chirpy drone of a home-improvement show burbles through the kitchen door. Nancy helps load the dishwasher, handing me things one by one, wiping the jam from knife to hands to trousers. We put some washing on, and then, because Nancy loves housework, we zip round the ground floor vacuuming and dusting. Nancy is delegated little jobs. She gets to tidy the newspapers and magazines and does this conscientiously, glancing at me to ensure I’m happy. She is given a duster and some spray polish and sings as she polishes: “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” This is her song. Since we got here she’s sung nothing else. The trouble is, she doesn’t know the words and fills her own into the stanzas, experimentally.
    “When all the things are lovely, dee dee, dee deeee de dee, And I am a milkmaid and I have a car, de dee, de deee, de deeeeeee.”
    O UR MEMORIES FOR music are stored in a different part of the brain from the ordinary language memory, and tunes survive longer in Alzheimer’s than words do. Capitalizing on this, dementia singing groups are springing up around the world. One reports great success with the Beatles songbook. What’s interesting is that the music memory appears to bring the words along with it, unlocking the language block. These groups have reported success with quite advanced dementia, citing cases of people with very little residual language who find, after a few sessions, that they can recall and sing lyrics without trouble.
    Music professionals with dementia make for interesting case histories. The American composer Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990), who died of Alzheimer’s, seems to have had a slow fade, having first developed symptoms in the early 1970s. He didn’t compose much after 1973 other than for reworking a couple of old pieces, but was still conducting his best-known work, Appalachian Spring , almost to the end—though critics complained that he lost the thread in the very last performances. Conducting is done from a different part of the brain again—squirreled away in the cerebellum, where our highly practiced, automatic gestures are delegated and stored. The cerebellum is one of the last places reached by Alzheimer’s disease.
    Copland seems to have had a lonely end. He was dropped by old friends as dementia took hold; two such who ventured to his home on his ninetieth birthday, three weeks before his death, expecting there to be a gathering, a party and a cake, found there were no other visitors. People are afraid of this disease. I know of people who find that when their parent becomes demented, the rest of the family and all the old friends cut them off. One of the people I have “met” on Internet Alzheimer’s forums, an American who’s returned from her city life to live with her ill and widowed mother, tells me that not only have people