Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's Read Online Free PDF

nothing else, all upset forgotten. We go down to the road, down the long driveway between looming dark hedges of fuchsia, and stand between the entrance pillars and admire the view. She runs an appreciative finger over the house name, indented in brass set into the stone, and I’m shocked to find that she can’t read the word that’s the house name. She can’t recognize the letters and, even when I tell her what they are, can’t vocalize them into a run of sounds. She’s interested in them, though, as in something half remembered, on the tip of her tongue, running her fingers over the brass a second time, frowning and with concentration. Shocked, I go back to Chris in his office. “Your mother can’t read; she can’t read anymore,” I tell him. It’s stunning because it’s so absolute, so concrete a loss. Parietal lobe damage is to blame again, it seems, in that zone of the brain where visual impressions are organized and reading and writing are ordered and understood. I read about this on the Internet, which has become my personal guide, dementia caregivers’ network, MD, and hospital rolled into one handy package.
    It isn’t, any of it, a linear progression. Damage, or at least the symptoms of damage, can appear to waver like flickering wiring. Some days Nancy has vocabulary, some days not. She’s wandering the house looking for her shoes, and when I ask if I can help, she looks down at the floor, offering me a lifted socked foot. “The things, the things that go on the … that go on the things. I want to. I want the things that go on the end.” Perhaps this is a sign of parietal lobe damage again, failing to match word and object, or perhaps it has to do with the plaques/tangles invading Broca’s area, a patch on the left side of the frontal lobe that was named after Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–1880), who had a patient in 1861 who could say only “tan.” It’s the zone charged specifically with talking. It’s fascinating, this physical loss of abilities in the departments of self, but in tracking Nancy’s neuronal failure, I face self-accusations of ghoulishness.
    Random stream-of-consciousness nonsense has become a feature in the mornings. Miscellaneous phrases from the past, from the long-term memory, fall out of the box in random order.
    “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says, “because I was worried about that.”
    “About what?”
    She looks at me appraisingly, as if making a decision about whether she can confide, before launching in. “It’s been a long time, and I didn’t always do it that way, oh no, don’t you believe him when he puts it off, because I can tell you, it’s all the other way, really, to be quite truthful, and he knows it is, and I could strangle him sometimes, but the woman said I was to go that way, so I went, and it wasn’t there. Did I tell you that? I said that before and you haven’t got it. I know that. I do know that. I’m not really as stupid as I look, but she says—oh the things I could tell you about her, but I won’t because you shouldn’t—and I have got to find the thing now or I won’t hear the end of it.”
    “Her?” I ask.
    “The woman,” Nancy says, rolling her eyes.
    “But it’s just you and me here,” I say. “We’re the only ones.”
    “No, no, no,” Nancy says briskly. “Not you. The other woman.”
    T AKING ON N ANCY’S care, full time, seven days, twenty-four hours, has been … I wish I could find a better word than shock . It’s been a shock. The thesaurus offers “trauma,” but that isn’t remotely it. It hasn’t been a “blow” or an “upset,” a “bombshell” or a “jolt.” It’s more like the kind of experience that leaves you staring into space openmouthed. How on earth did I get here? you think. And how am I going to extricate myself? There’s no adequate preparation for the physical demands, the physical hour-after-hourness of full-time caregiving. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would need to