Alzheimer’s disease

Dying wish

Miscellaneous / / 29 minutes of reading

“NY-NY-NY-ny-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-ny-ny-ny-ny-ny.”

“Hi Mum,” I say.

I lean over, kiss her forehead and pull up a chair. She’s in a dark-blue nightie and is lying on her side, legs drawn up beneath her like a dying bird, arms held out in front of her, bent at the elbows across her scrawny chest.

She pulls at a thread hanging from the sleeve. “Ny-ny-ny-ny-sh-sh-sh-sh-ny-ny-ny.”

At the same time, she is grinding her teeth, a sound as loud and harsh as a stick being dragged along a picket fence. In the background, a CD of meditation classics pipes from the small stereo on a side table.

I try her name, more brightly, but feel helpless. “Susie,” I call. I stand over her again, forcing myself into her line of vision.

“Yes,” she says flatly, and I’m taken aback by the sudden acknowledgment. For a moment, it seems she’s recognised her own name.

But I cannot be sure, and her grey eyes don’t meet mine, or register my presence. “Ny-ny-ny-ny-ny,” she resumes. Her head lolls back and forth.

Suddenly, a deep exhaustion seems to fall upon her. She raises a hand to her brow, sticks her thumb in her mouth, falls silent, and her bowels open.

Sue is seventy-two.… Read more..

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The forgotten Christmas

Miscellaneous / / 6 minutes of reading

“Here, mum.”

I hold the fork close to her mouth. Turkey, cranberry, a little salad. “Here.” She looks around, moving her head from side to side. One hand picks up her knife, holds it back to front, puts it down again. Then she picks up a spoon. “No, no, here. On your fork.” She puts the spoon down, and reaches for her serviette, clutching it hard in her hand.

My brother and mother-in-law are engaged in Christmas conversation and I can sense their chatter is disturbing to mum; she can follow neither them nor my directions. “Can you shush a minute? Mum, here. Here.” I’ve got her attention, but she can’t see what I’m trying to draw it towards.

“Don’t get frustrated,” my brother admonishes softly, but it’s hard, so hard, to quell the feelings of impatience, mingled with disbelief, followed by guilt. Infants learn to understand pointing by 12 months. My mother can’t see, or recognise, the food being waved in front of her face. This is what the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease looks like.

Before lunch, my brother had put in her favourite dangling cat earrings. We took her to the bathroom so she could admire them in the mirror but she barely recognised herself, let alone the jewellery.… Read more..

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Dying by degrees

Miscellaneous, Music / / 5 minutes of reading

Songs don’t have trigger warnings; if they did, they wouldn’t hit us so damn hard. News stories might warn viewers or readers in advance that the content they are about to consume may be graphic but, in art, an R rating or parental advisory sticker shouldn’t protect us from the shock and awe of emotional impact.

Some of the great songs in history cover intensely difficult terrain. Some of them even become fluke hits: Suzanne Vega’s late-’80s classic Luka, a study of child abuse, is one. Archie Roach’s Took The Children Away endures, too, because you didn’t have to be a member of the Stolen Generations to be moved by Roach’s suffering.

About a year ago, I heard a song by Melbourne songwriter Jen Cloher, Hold My Hand, the last song on her most recent album In Blood Memory. It hit me like a truck. The song is a conversation between two old lovers. One asks the other to tell the story of how they first met. He responds:

Well my dear, it was cold,

Shivering, nearly snow

You wore my favourite coat.

But his answer is instantly forgotten, and the conversation, like the song, becomes circular:

Did I dear?… Read more..

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