Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey Into Alzheimer's (22 page)

Chapter 24

When ideas fail, words come in very handy
.

—G
OETHE

M
ORRIS IS CONFIDING IN CAREGIVERS BUT NOT IN US,
and now the contrast has become explicit. His favorite stays on past her duties to talk and I overhear things I wish I hadn’t. Standing in the kitchen making a shopping list, I hear the aide’s voice from next door, raised slightly, arguing a point. “But it’s your home, too, Morris.” I’m beginning to wonder if factions are forming.

He’s ill, with ongoing kidney problems, and has disappeared somewhere within himself that Prozac can’t reach. He no longer makes an effort to speak to the children. Any of the grandchildren who dare run the gauntlet of Nancy’s heckling and threats and go into their grandparents’ sitting room find that not even Granddad seems happy to see them. He has nothing to say to them and has lost all curiosity. On Millie’s birthday he is unforgivably morose. Nancy’s quite chipper: Presented with a slab of cake and a dog on the next sofa cushion, begging for a bit, she seems perfectly content. She has a lengthy conversation with the terrier about whether he’s a good boy and deserves pudding. Morris sits in his chair and looks at the carpet. He eats a bit of cake and leaves the rest. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t wish Millie a happy birthday until prompted. He pointedly doesn’t take an interest in her gifts. This makes the whole day seem heavy. It’s hard to rise above the heaviness set by such unwarranted indifference.

Nancy’s nighttime restlessness has a new flavor to it, one of strident noncompliance. Nancy’s ranting into the wee small hours and Morris is at his wits’ end. We check up on them every half hour, standing outside their door and listening.

9:30
P.M.
Nancy’s voice, chivying Morris, trying to galvanize him to get out of bed.

“We’ve got to get out of here, come on, we’ve got to get home. We need to go. We’ve got to get up and get dressed and go now. But you aren’t listening. No. You’re not listening to me. You never listen. You just lie there, a useless lump. All the people here hate you but you don’t know that. They hate you. They hate me, too, but that’s beside the point. I’m used to it. I don’t say anything. They tell me what to do all day. All day I have to do the work. They should do the work but I have to do it. You just sit there. And they—they have got you all wrapped up. All wrapped up. Yes, miss, whatever you say. She thinks she’s in charge but she isn’t. She’s going to get a shock. I’m going to surprise her one of these days. I’ll sort her out once and for all. She doesn’t know the first thing about it, not a thing.”

10:00
P.M.
Nancy is moving around. We can hear her dressing. She is pulling clothes out of the cupboard. The wire coat hangers tinkle and clank as they fall. We hear her walking, her heavy breathing, and her continuing monologue.

“This is what we need. We need these things to go home. We need to go home now. I have the things, the things and the other things and the rest of the things. You have to get the other things now. But you won’t do that, will you? No. You just lie there, doing nothing. Doing nothing as usual. I have to do everything.”

The door opens. I’m standing in the corridor. Nancy looks at me and closes it again.

“She’s there. She’s standing there,” she says to Morris, who doesn’t respond. “I need more things to get the things. She is going to take them. She will take them away and sell them. She doesn’t want anything or anything but the money. She will take the money. That’s right. I know that. I have always said that but you won’t listen. You don’t say anything to her. It’s all left to me as usual.”

The door opens cautiously and Nancy peers out.

“Hello, Nancy,” I say. “Time for bed now, isn’t it?”

“No,” she says. “It isn’t time for bed. I’m just going out for a walk.”

I go in and open the curtain a little. “But look out there,” I say. “Look how dark it is.”

“Oh. Oh dear.”

“It’s very late and everybody’s going to bed.”

“Oh.”

“Time for you to go to bed now.”

She gets into bed, muttering under her breath. I close the bedroom door and put an ear to it.

“She’s such a bitch. A bitch, and you don’t say so. You don’t do anything about it ever.”

10:30
P.M.
Nancy is still talking, though more quietly. I can’t make out individual words but they pour out of her in a stream. She sounds as if she’s sitting up in bed.

11:00
P.M.
She’s out of bed again. I go in and take her to the bathroom—usually her bedtime cup of tea has caught up with her by now—and put her back to bed. “Good night, then, have a lovely sleep, see you in the morning,” I say, tucking her in firmer.

She glares at me.

“Don’t even talk to me. Don’t you dare even say a word.”

I should walk away. Usually I do but sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I mind having my evening fragmented. On those days I have to have the last word.

“Well, that’s charming,” I chide. “That’s very good manners, isn’t it?” As I leave the room, the low monotone starts up again, the words “she” and “bitch” just audible.

11:30
P.M.
Nancy’s wandering the halls. She looms in her white nightdress out of unexpected directions in the dark like a phantom. She’s not keen on returning to her room. Morris speaks up. “For god’s sake, for pity’s sake, Nancy, shut up and get into bed. I’m not sleeping and I’m getting really fed up with you now.”

“Oh right then. Oh fine,” she says, getting into bed and pulling the duvet over her nose. Two affronted rheumy blue eyes stare at me from the covers.

Midnight is the fighting zone.

M
ORRIS:
Nancy, I’ve told you, I need to go to sleep now. Will you just shut up and go to sleep?

N
ANCY:
I certainly will not. Who the hell do you think you are?

M
ORRIS:
I’m your husband and what I say goes.

N
ANCY:
Oh are you. Are you indeed. Well, we’ll see about that.

M
ORRIS:
Be QUIET.

N
ANCY:
I’m going home. I can’t stand another minute of this place.

M
ORRIS:
Get back into bed RIGHT NOW. I mean it.

N
ANCY:
You’re a fine one to talk. You just do everything she says. She tells you what you can do and what you can’t do. She has everything she wants and you have nothing. You don’t have any of it anymore. You just lie there. You are never helpful to me. You never do what I say. But she. Oh she. She is ever so that way, and you know it. She has you wrapped round her finger.

M
ORRIS:
What are you talking about now? Who does?

N
ANCY:
You know very well.

M
ORRIS:
You’re talking rubbish. Shut up and go to sleep.

N
ANCY:
I won’t shut up. Not until you tell her. You must tell her, this is my house.

M
ORRIS:
Who? Who are you talking about?

I know who she’s talking about. And so does he. But when he’s exasperated he can’t resist reminding her of her failing memory.

N
ANCY:
I don’t have to tell you her name.

M
ORRIS:
You don’t know it, do you? You don’t know anybody’s name.

N
ANCY:
Don’t be ridiculous.

M
ORRIS:
Go on then. What’s mine?

N
ANCY:
You know your name very well.

M
ORRIS:
I do. But you don’t, do you?

12:30
A.M.
Morris is quiet again, probably asleep. Nancy rants on undauntedly. At this point Chris might give her a spoonful of something prescribed to help her sleep, though we try to minimize its use because of the hangover that will follow. If she gets sleeping syrup, she’ll doze most of the following day and be awake all that night angry, which demands another dose, another day of dozing and another wakeful night, leading to more and larger dosages. So is it that a care facility syndrome is born.

In any case the sleeping syrup doesn’t always work. What she needs, I tell Chris, is rhino tranquilizer. We stand outside her door and whisper and stifle our giggles at the idea of a rifle with a tranquilizer dart. We’re not quite ourselves. Later, I look up sleep disturbance in dementia and find that melatonin levels in the pineal gland fall in Alzheimer’s sufferers, who as a result no longer take darkness as a cue. Melatonin can be given as drops, apparently, but you can’t buy it over the counter in Britain; caregivers on message boards get theirs from the United States. As Alzheimer’s progresses into the final dark phase there will be a complete turnaround, and sleeping will be the norm, as the disease goes further and deeper and cell damage is such that wakefulness can’t be supported. The brain is then so damaged that it demands unconsciousness in order to muster all its forces of repair.

1:00
A.M.
Nancy’s monologues are sleepier, with more pauses. We go to bed, hopeful of rest. Most nights now there is another breakout, or a succession of them, typically at 2:00
A.M.
, 3:30, 5:15. Chris jumps out of bed and goes blurrily off, insisting I go back to sleep. I hear their two voices echoing up the stairway.

“No, Mother. You’re not going anywhere.”

“I’ll do as I please.”

“Be quiet, you’re waking the children.”

“I will not.”

But when he’s away working I have to get up and do the night shift. This is difficult. There’s a reason, other than for filial duty and husbandly kindness, that otherwise it’s always Chris who goes off to sort his mother out at night. Nancy has taken against me, me specifically. She’s dramatically less cooperative with me than with anyone. She sees me coming and bristles.

There’s been an abrupt switch around. I’ve gone from most favored to least. “And who the hell do you think you are?” she asks when I take her elbow and try to steer her bedward. “This has always been my house, do you hear, and I want you to leave RIGHT NOW.” She turns, her face set with hatred, cheeks reddened, mouth turned decisively down. “You, you are not worth anything, do you hear me? Nothing. You think you’re somebody, don’t you? You really think you’re somebody. Well, you’re not. You’re NOTHING. NOTHING. You’re not worth the shit on my shoe.”

The home aides are getting some of this treatment, too. Nancy wakes in a foul temper most days, and the appearance of the home care team, cheerily wishing her a good morning as they go to get Morris out of bed, is the trigger for ranting verbal abuse. “She’s a bit upset this morning,” the ladies say to me, looking rather shaken. “Not a happy bunny.” “Nancy’s been crying and upset and she’s set Morris off.” Morris is wheeled through with red eyes, a wet hankie.

“You know it’s just the Alzheimer’s talking, don’t you?” I say to him. “It isn’t you she’s having a go at. It’s just the disease speaking.”

“I know, dear,” he says, his voice cracking, “but that doesn’t make it easier to take.”

How hideous this is for him. How intolerable and cruel, to spend your seventies in this state (he’s three years Nancy’s junior), witnessing the death of your wife by slow degrees and having to deal with this protracted and ongoing grief, a pre-death bereavement spread over a decade. Not for nothing is Alzheimer’s known as
the long good-bye
. Other people in their seventies go traveling, have adventures. What’s worse, having Alzheimer’s or being handcuffed to it and forced to watch? If it
is
just the Alzheimer’s talking and Nancy is already gone, then Morris’s seems to me much the worse of the two fates.

Some mornings, Nancy gets in the way of his routine and one of the aides brings her out of the bedroom and chums her while Morris is dressing. I hear Nancy’s voice, monologuing away as if it were still 1:00
A.M.,
as if she’d not paused for breath. “And I say so but he doesn’t listen to me. He’s useless. He just sits there and won’t come home. And he won’t stand up to her. Oh no. The bitch has it all her own way. Yes. She says what goes and what doesn’t go. He won’t say a word. Not a word.” The aides don’t comment but I can see from their reactions that they know the bitch is me. They shut the kitchen door so I can’t hear. What they don’t know is that when they leave the house, even before their fingers have left the door handle, Nancy’s delivering her parting shot toward their receding footsteps. “She’s a terrible bitch, that one. Don’t let her in the house again. I’ll not have her in the house. Coming into my house and talking to my husband like he was hers. She should get her own husband.”

Husband
is a word she uses only when cornered, these days.
Husband
is a word available only by means of the emergency generator, the same one that powers conversation with the health visitor.
Husband
is a concept dredged up under pressure. We’re all a threat, as she perceives us, all the other women who populate the house, to her marriage and her matriarchal rule. I come to realize that the days in which Morris has more protracted contact with the home caregivers, the days they hang about and are animated and make Morris laugh—those are Nancy’s worst days. She sits in her chair watching, and rubbing her hands, saying nothing until they are gone. Then she’ll be foul and ungovernable all morning. She’ll likely as not be foul all day.

T
HE QUARTERLY ASSESSMENT
is due. We sit in the conservatory and take tea, as is habitual.

“I’m afraid I have bad news,” our care manager tells us.