The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [26]
M is for the miseries of Menopause,
O is for the road to Oblivion,
T is for the Tailspin of ageing,
H is for the feeling of Helplessness,
E is for the feeling of Emptiness,
R is for my Rage over losing my Role of M O T H E R.
20 February. ‘The future is not something I’m dying to get to,’ I remember Noel saying when he was six or seven (and I laughed, seeing the dark humour). Now, I feel the opposite: the future is not something I’m in any hurry to get to. The future is not what it used to be.
The buy-out I signed allowed me to teach part time, which I’ve wanted for years, but I now know I’ll never be able to do that. I feel like I’ve spent my life climbing the rungs of a slide.
22 February. Alzheimerland is a foreign country. Time doesn’t move the same way here, calendars are fuzzy, the days and months shuffled like cards in a deck. And space is different too -- the land seems to wobble, the signposts shift. You stumble through mud or sand, through mines and traps. And it’s hard to talk to people here, to speak their language. It’s so hard to get used to -- it’s not like where I grew up.
Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you went in? Entering the FORGETTERY, I used to call it. Or was it my husband who called it that? Anyway, we used to laugh but now I don’t find it so funny -- because that’s how we Alzheimerians spend our waking hours.
26 February. Is Alois Alzheimer spinning in his grave, I wonder, remembered only for a disease of forgetting? Do many Germans have this last name? Or has it died out, like Hitler’s?
2 March. Someone came over today. I don’t know who it was, although the face looked so familiar. I tried to pretend, but I don’t think I fooled anybody.
It leaves me angry and frustrated. And I’m afraid I take out my frustration and anger on poor Noel. What would I do without him? I’d be in a padded cell, that’s where I’d be.
My plan was to go back to teaching, part time,
I can see myself ending up in a nursing home, and the idea kills me (Freudian slip, I meant to say ‘fills me’) with pain and sadness. I don’t want to go. I pray my brain will hold out a little longer, until I’m dead ...
9 March. Everything inside so hollow, so grey and dry. My brain leaking memory and hope. So grey! I’m underwater, it feels like, in dark and blurry waters. Perhaps like those my husband saw, before he died.
13 March. Three days have gone by. I know this only because I saw the date on the newspaper (the only line I read these days). Three more days, cancelled days, gone without a trace. A trio of blank squares cut out of the calendar.
15 March. I’m watching too much television. That’s all I seem to do these days. I like shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire Jeopardy, even though Noel can’t stand it. He thinks the questions are too easy. I used to agree with him, but now I’m starting to find that I can’t even answer the early questions. The answers just don’t come! There’s another quiz show I like but I can’t remember its name.
18 March. I came to sit here because I wanted to write something important but I can’t remember what it was. I’ve been sitting here for an hour or two with a mind that feels like cake batter, looking down at the white letters on the keys, or up at ringed calendar days and not knowing why they’re ringed ...
Just remembered -- after watching some stupid quiz show on TV. It’s about this newspaper article I cut out. (I’m trying to read as much as I can, because Noel said it’s good for the brain, but I find TV easier and it’s probably too late now anyway.) In any case, I have it beside me now. It’s from The Gazette.
Mercy killer commits suicide
A man who pleaded guilty to suffocating his mother in what he claimed was a mercy killing has killed himself while out on day parole.
Noel Burun, 32, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of his mother, Stella Burun, who suffered from Alzheimer