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

getting better now.” Nancy’s at a good-days-and-bad-days stage of Alzheimer’s, and on bad days she accuses Morris of having given her the stubble, perhaps because she recognizes that beards are properly the province of men.
    She returns to her little sitting room, her coal fire, her husband, and sits in her pale blue winged armchair. She asks, now, if it’s hers and if she can sit there. She hasn’t had it long enough to remember it. Only the very-long-term memory is functioning. Morris is sitting in the chair beside her, is always sitting in the chair beside her. His is electrically powered, tips back, is upholstered in orange tapestry. He was stout once and, with his square face, mischievous dark eyes, dark hair combed over, and mustache, resembled a rather better-looking Oliver Hardy, and was just as likely to suffer fools gladly. He’s mellowed. He appears to have shrunk, in all dimensions.
    I’ve known Morris and Nancy for twenty-two years. When I first met them, brought home by Chris from university, I thought them old-fashioned, thrifty (furnishings and appliances had remained unchanged over decades), sociable, hardworking, right-wing. They were Daily Mail readers, natural conservatives, but generous about our student leftiness. I don’t recall anything much in the way of ideological standoff. They were all hospitality, bailed us out when we got into financial hot water, let us stay with them on an indefinite basis when work plans went awry. Despite finding our postgraduate ideas about office jobs and steady security highly provoking (we didn’t fancy either of these much), they were nothing but kind. Kind but unforthcoming, opinion withheld. This has been a pattern in our relationships.
    Nancy and Morris moved here with the rest of us this summer. We have a lot of latitude in where we live. Latitude and longitude. Chris is an internationally known-in-his-own-niche expert on a specific use of new technology, and he consults widely, mostly from his home office, though there are bouts of meetings and flying. We have two teenage girls—Millie, sixteen, who’s tall and dark like her mother, and Caitlin, fourteen, who shares her father’s ash-blond coloring—and a boy called Jack, ten, a senior at primary school, tall and lanky and Italianate, with a scruffy dark shock of hair.
    Moving, it turns out, isn’t good for Alzheimer’s patients. Leaving behind the familiar, having to adapt to the new. Nancy’s disorientation is ongoing. “I don’t know where I am,” she sobs, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing.”
    I’ve been reading about memory. In cases of transient global amnesia (total but temporary memory loss), people ask over and over where they are and what they should do, how they got there, what they should do, what should they do now? Doing is a big preoccupation. They don’t ask what might seem to be the obvious question: Who am I? That doesn’t seem to be a question the self asks of the self. Instead, it looks for clues from context: where, how, what.
    Chris and I have different responses to her anxiety. He takes her hand and is tender, explaining that they weren’t coping, she and his father, and have come to live with us. I go for a jollier approach. “Well, lucky for you you’re retired now and you can sit in this chair by the fire and eat biscuits and watch the afternoon film on the telly,” I say. “Not like poor old me, I’ve got washing to see to, dogs to walk and vacuuming, the dinner to sort out, and you should see Jack’s bedroom.” Jack is proving dedicated to the acquisition of stuff, particularly electronic stuff (gadgets, dead laptops), as well as guns, swords, and lighters. Sometimes I worry about where these interests might lead.
    “Oh, poor you, having to do all that,” Nancy says, fleetingly lucid, playing along, and I’m embarrassed at being caught out talking to her in this nice-nurse fashion. But the moment passes and she’s back at the window.