The Little Girl in the Radiator: Mum Alzheimer's & Me Read Online Free PDF

began to walk about the house looking here and there for inspiration,
and found myself in the garage. Like so many people, we never put our car in
there, even through the harshest winters; instead, we left it sitting all night
in the street, and filled the garage instead with a lifetime’s collection of
useless junk and worthless memorabilia. My old school reports (must try
harder), rolls of carpet (must get this cleaned), a mostly cracked, china
dinner service (must glue this all back together one day), my dad’s tools (you
never know when you’ll need an Allen key), the lawnmower we no longer needed
after dad had paved the lawn...
    Dad’s tools! I spun around and spied his old
saw; it was a bit rusty now, but if I sawed the goose into quarters, perhaps
people would be able to store it for me then? I picked up the rusty saw and
waved it about me like it was Excalibur. Then a little voice in my head told me
I would probably poison the both of us if I used it on the bird. Back to the
drawing board.
    It was bitterly cold at night that winter…
    A few moments later I stood back and admired
my ingenuity. The goose was sitting on a wooden garden chair next to a small
round garden table. We used to take our meals out there in the summer. It could
sit outside, the temperature would be cold enough and the meat wouldn’t go off;
it was too big for a stray cat to drag away in the middle of the night. I
smiled: another problem solved.
    * * * * *
    After supper in the evenings, mum and I
would watch television together and chat. I remember our talks together as
being some of the nicest times we shared, even if the conversations were a bit
off the wall.
    She would tell me all the events of her day,
while I had been at work – about the cowboys on their magnificent horses who
had driven great herds of cattle past our window as they went up the street,
about the burning plane that had crashed in our front garden, and about the
great ship that had sunk in the middle of the road outside.
    At first, I thought these stories were
simply the Alzheimer’s sharpening her imagination, and presenting her with
fascinating delusions. Later – after the Jaws incident – I realised she
was only relating to me whatever she had been watching on the television
earlier in the day. The cowboys were from an old western movie, the plane crash
from a war film, the ship was the Titanic , and so on. When she watched a
movie she lost the ability to separate fact from fiction, and the events of
those films became real to her, as though they had actually played out for
real, in the street outside, or even inside the house itself. It got to the
point where I would listen carefully to her account of the events of her day
and then try to guess the film she had been watching. After she had gone to
bed, I’d check the TV listings in the paper; I was right more than once.
    It is terribly emotionally draining to watch
the daily mental deterioration of a person you have loved all of your life.
It’s like witnessing a daily robbery, where each time another precious piece of
their mind is stolen, and no matter what steps you take it can never be
recovered. It’s irreversible: once it’s gone, it’s gone. To watch a once-keen
and sharp mind become steadily confused and blunted, to witness mental
dexterity disappear like the water from a leaking pot, tears your soul in two.
The anger and frustration you feel as a helpless bystander to this awful crime
leaves you in shreds.
    We were watching TV after supper one
evening, and mum leaned over and looked at the radiator which ran the length of
the back wall of the living room. I watched as she smiled lovingly at it, and
nodded once or twice. Her lips moved as though she were saying something, and
then she nodded her head again. Then she looked back at the television. I had
seen her do this before but had never remarked upon it. Whereas in a healthy
person it would have caused a mild alarm, with mum it was almost