Reading about dementia is a moving experience, and frightening. one. Our brains are such fragile things and yet they hold the whole of us. Without them we are nothing. No thing. Nothing. Sally Magnusson writes about her mother’s Alzheimer’s which seems to be a kind of loss of normal wiring, every thing becomes a mass, a jumble, a tangle in there. “I’ve lost myself”, one of Alzheimer’s patients in 1906 said to him. Loss. It is all about loss. And what remains? And then there was the article he read out to me while I prepared supper about the two daughters who took their mother to Dignitas in Switzerland. She’d had massive stroke and was left with no quality of life whatsoever. She wanted to die. They helped her. And on their return the police were waiting. Life seems so topsy turvy at times. And then there is P, and C&C, all experiencing some kind of hell. And yet, some would say, there’s still life. C wants to take C to her favourite hotel. They are out and about in the way that P cannot be. She has lost almost everything. She has her books, and a treasured things to crowd up her room, and her two loving sons. There’s still something but not enough, I suspect. My heart aches for her and them and them and them…..
Those gentle touches of synchronicity warm me. The mention of the word Hausfrau in the book after it was a clue in the crossword yesterday. The turning up of the word burgeon and then mushroom, after I’d thought of using them in my article. Is it a gesture of connection? We know you, we are near you – such serendipidity seems to imply, or am I being fanciful? Who cares?
You break my heart with your toils and struggles but I do love you. All of you. And you.
