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Nana couldn’t tell you if it was Tuesday or Thanksgiving. Alzheimer’s does not discriminate. It doesn’t matter if you were a pastpresident, Oscar winning actor, British Prime Minister, or former assembly lineworker for IBM, like Nana. The symptoms universal the outcome the same; Nana’sconcept of time had vanished along with some of her memory.
As the Alzheimer’s grip tightened,you knew exactly what would happen if your mind was in tact enough and graspedthe diagnosis. Nana was lucky; sheshuffled out of the neurologists office swearing.
“That goddamn doctor is a no good son of a bitch he’s the onewho needs his head examined.” Sheknew how long she had been in Hilton Head.
“A few goddamn days.”
It was official; Nana was more than just mixed up andconfused. Denial as a form oftreatment now replaced by a prescription for Aricept.
When Nana’s routine consisted of forgetting to take hermedication, bathe, get dressed and eat. It was clear she could no longer live alone in Poughkeepsie. Now her routine is new to her every day like the palmtree in the back yard.
“I’ve never seen a palm tree before. Does it belong to you?” Each morning I tell her it does.
Nana wants to know if Luke andSophie (her great grandchildren) started school yet. She doesn’t mean for the day, she means at all. They are nineteen and sixteenrespectively. She remembersthem being five and a half and seven. Nana lives somewhere between twenty and sixty yearsago. It’s a combination thatchanges by the hour, as she travels effortlessly through the decades, while westruggle to keep up.
The doors of the house chime whenthey are opened. It’s a featureintended to alert you when someone enters, but now the chimes signal Nana’s attemptedescape. Sometimes it’s two in themorning, but we can count on the five o’clock “sun downing” when Alzheimer’spatients across the country line up to head home. Nana shuffles out of her room with fresh lipstick, her derigueur handbag resting on her shoulder, glances to see if anyone is watching,gives a wave and announces she is going home and makes a break for it shufflingas fast as she can to the front door. She opens it. The door chimes and we help her to her chair. And then she sits and forgets somemore.
Nana doesn’t remember her second Thanksgiving in Hilton Headis a few weeks away. When we tell her she has been here for almost ten months. She looks at my mother and me like weare crazy, shakes her head, points her famous finger at us and says. “I know how long I’ve been in HiltonHead…a few goddamn days.” Nana is living proof of the old cliché that... “Whatyou don’t know doesn’t hurt you.”
