Keir Royale

Every time there’s new research suggesting Alzheimer’s Disease can run in families, I find myself keeping a close eye on my mother; listening to her voice to detect any changes, worrying if she tells the same story twice, and rifling through her kitchen when I go to stay. I know if she starts keeping tea bags in the freezer it’s only a matter of time before I follow suit.

My grandmother always said she’d leave her home feet first, but that was before she started phoning my mother to accuse her of stealing the family silver. I was living nearby at the time and did what I could to keep her going.

I had an extra bell attached to the phone so she could hear it, and so I didn’t have wait while it rang and rang, wondering whether she was lying at the bottom of the stairs, or just watching telly.

She stopped washing her clothes, so I took them away when she wasn’t looking. If she caught me I’d get a furious,
“What are you doing with those? I CAN do my own washing you know.”

I cut her grass and pulled out her weeds, to a chorus of,
“Don’t take that, there’ll be nothing left in the garden at this rate.”

A friend and I redecorated her kitchen while she was away visiting friends. We’d just got the wallpaper scrapers out and the kettle on, when we started scratching. The house was infested with fleas. It was a hot summer and her last surviving cat had died only a few weeks before. The fleas were starving and we were their last chance of life.

I tried to get her some home support, but the attempts of the district nurse to get her to take her blood pressure tablets regularly were spectacularly unsuccessful. The nurse brought a container labelled with the days of the week, into which she put the correct number of pills for each day. My grandmother slid the lid on a different way each time she took out a pill. So Monday would first become Sunday, then Monday again, and she’d take two lots of pills on one day and none the next.
Then she started putting the cat’s worming pills into the container, and that’s when the district nurse gave up.

My gran had seemed a bit forgetful for a few years, and I remember being very irritated that she was incapable of taking an accurate telephone message. I even lost a job and gained 20 parking fines because of her blundering on the phone. But it wasn’t until my grandfather died, when she was seventy-nine, that the cracks started to widen.

She dealt with her grief in typical fashion.
“I’ve bought a new cooker. Tom was too tight to spend the money. You can’t take it with you, and it’ll burn where some of ‘em are going.”

But my grandfather had always dealt with their finances, so she started paying her pension into one account and her bills out of another. I had her pension paid directly into her current account and set up direct debits for all her bills, but she foiled this simple arrangement by walking into town to pay the “balance paid” on her account.
I had words with one of the utility companies, which had allowed her to go hundreds of pounds into credit.

But I think it was the cats which finally made me realise she wasn’t coping.

I went round to see her and Kizzy was wrapped up in a blanket on the settee.

“He’s not very well,” she told me. I went to have a closer look. His staring eyes were bulging, his legs were stuck out in front of it like a furry occasional table, and he was obviously long dead.

Later a relative went on holday, and she told me she’d lost one of his two cats she was looking after. I knocked on neighbours’ doors and reported it missing. When the relative returned home and I went round to explain, he said,
“We only left her with one.”

I eventually managed to get the local Alzheimer’s nurse to visit once a week, and one day she called me at work to say my gran had been upset that morning because her cat had died. So the nurse had buried it in the garden for her.
Unfortunately my grandmother’s last cat had died two years earlier.

I laugh now, and I laughed at the time; a lot. But it was all part of her steady decline. Eventually she went into St Saviour’s hospital for a six-week assessment. She didn’t return to her own home, but even two years later I couldn’t drive her past her old house without her chiding me,
“Where are you going? You’ve driven straight past.”

Once she was in residential care, she was clean and sweet smelling. She had her hair shampooed and set every week and ate healthy meals. Whenever I went to see her she complained about the other residents,
“Look at ‘em all just sitting there like a lot of lemons. Never been to Guernsey, half of ‘em.”

She didn’t lose the ability to eat or talk, and we had endless circular conversations about what I was doing, who my boyfriend was and where her husband was. She eventually forgot he’d died and it seemed kinder to let her believe he was “down the pub” or “up the boxing”.

In many ways she was happier as the disease progressed. At the beginning she’d been anxious and aggressive, as she was aware her memory was failing. She’d check the oven was off three or four times before she left the house and spend hours every day searching for her handbag.
But once she lost a grip on reality, she could live from moment to moment.

I was always greeted with,
“What you doing here? Your hair wants a brush through it.”

I never felt her quality of life was unacceptable, and I always enjoyed her company and her lust for life - even when I was driven mad by the constant repetition.

Now though, as I keep an eye on my mother, I worry for my children if I succumb to the disease. After a short time of anxiety, I’ll eventually slip far enough into an eternal present to live a contended Groundhog Day half-life.

They’ll be the ones who’ll have to cope with losing their mother, slowly.

I only hope they’ll be able to laugh with me, as I did with my Gran.

This article appeared in Jersey Now in 2005.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed