Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's by Andrea Gillies Page B

them live here with you.”
    Nancy’s face acquires a stony set look. “My. Parents. Are. Coming for me.”
    When the forest fire of Alzheimer’s causes havoc in the frontal lobe, it attacks the site that most approximates our adult selves. Frontal lobe damage can return dementia sufferers to childlikeness, and also childishness. Childishness is the worst because it’s coated in a veneer of adult power, assumed authority, and physical strength. Sufferers can become unpredictably emotional, and this is likely to worsen until—probably late in stage 6—it burns itself out, the sufferer too ill to feel anything much. This is a fact I take comfort in, and the idea, leading on from this, that consciousness itself is eroded, so that by stage 7 there’s too little left of the self to experience anything much of what’s happening. In dementia, emotions can become dislocated from feelings. Emotions are bodily reactions, and feelings intellectual ones. The emotions are produced but the feelings—emotional impulses translated by the thinking mind—are lost or locked off. Nancy is emotional, now that Morris is in hospital, but she doesn’t understand it. She cries and is grumpy and cries again and apologizes to us all. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she tells us, and that’s literally true. It takes a facility for remembering in order to know what it is you are feeling and why.
    Poor Morris is likely to be in hospital for a while. He’s been to the county hospital for an operation to reset the bone, and is now back in the town, in the cottage hospital there, in his own room, with a television and a lifetime supply of toffee. The toffee is a way of dealing with the forcible giving up of nicotine. He’s become a chain toffee eater. We speak to the doctors about Nancy’s urgent need to have him home, in his usual chair. No dice; Morris won’t be released until he’s a bit more mobile. Nancy sits holding his hand and looks utterly blank. Having no memory of the accident, and unable to remember the hospital from one day to the next, she’s having trouble with the context of his being there sufficient to undermine her ideas about who Morris is, exactly. She’s no longer entirely sure.
    We have horses now, two cobs: a chestnut one and a gray. Mine, the gray, is huge, like a medieval war horse with a long wavy mane. In the evenings, when the children are in place and happy to Nancy-sit, Chris and I ride out onto the headland. Curious bullocks come to the fences and snort, or dash across the pasture kicking their muddy heels, fizzing our horses into a froth. Sheep take off in a sinuous swarm, sticking together but running scared. Blown shreds of feed and fertilizer bags flap against barbed wire. I’m reminded that there’s another way of being out in wild places, something that supersedes introspection. Staying on board, the physical harmony of it, negotiating hazards and the intermittent thrill of speed: I may be beginning to see the point of sport.
    October stretches out mild and sunny, and the horses sit together, legs tucked sweetly under their tummies, in the long meadow grasses of the lower paddock, fed to satiation and drugged on sunshine. I take Nancy with me, under the white tape of the electric fence, presenting unexpected carrots from coat pockets, scratching under chins and into furry ears.
    “Nice doggies,” she says. And then, “Listen to me, saying nice doggies! What a fool I am sometimes. They’re not doggies, of course. I can’t think precisely of the word, though.”
    “Horses. They’re horses.”
    “Course they are!”
    She puts a tentative hand out to a velvety nose. “Nice doggies.”
    *  *  *
    N OW THAT WE have her to ourselves, Nancy comes everywhere with us. She sits with us to have breakfast, belching and apologizing, a faraway look in her eyes. (Something’s wrong, something’s missing, but what?) She’s becoming vague, losing track of where she is and what for. It