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

stopped calling or visiting, but when challenged about it they grow hostile, pointing out that it’s her mother’s “bad behavior” and “madness” that are to blame for their absence. People act as if dementia were contagious, she says, and the social stigma is as strong as ever. It can’t help if you’re a gay man, like Copland, without even the grudgingly given support of family. When things get difficult for old colleagues and fans, it’s easier for them to turn away, untroubled by duty.
    Nancy begins to sing variants of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” all day, on and off, for days at a time. I know what it’s like to get a song stuck in your head, one that seems to be there in the background of thought, unbidden, like Muzak playing in a shopping mall. But it’s possible that Nancy is suffering musical hallucinations. This isn’t just music that’s imagined but music that’s heard, as if by the ears. PET scans have shown that in hallucinators all the same areas of the brain light up as they do when people listen and pay attention to external music, other than for the principal auditory cortex that does the listening, and in this respect the inner music is exactly like a visual hallucination. The brain is “hearing” (again and again) music that isn’t coming in at the ears but is in every other way perfectly replicated. It doesn’t seem able to turn it off. Nancy, I suspect, is stuck in a hallucinatory loop, and is singing along to hers. I try her on some other songs I think she might remember, with no luck, though she can hum some of them, in snatches. Three blind mice, see how they run .… We start together, and sing the same line again, and then we both come to a halt, look at each other, break out laughing. Neither of us can recall what comes next. Farmer’s wife, carving knife, but how does it go exactly?

Chapter 3
A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen .
    —E DWARD DE B ONO
    W E’RE A MONTH IN TO THE EXPERIMENT AND I DECIDE that for now at least, I’ll give up the struggle to work. It’s the school holidays and for now at least, the pressure can justify itself in being off. I kick to the back of my mind the persistent question: What will Nancy do all day when you’re busy? That isn’t really the question, of course. The question, the real question, is: How will you get any work done with Nancy in the house?
    I go out into the hallway and see Nancy rubbing away at the same table I left her at ten minutes earlier, sweeping her cloth over the table legs and round the rim. The spray polish isn’t consulted. It’s too difficult to use the push button. The squirting stuff comes out at unpredictable angles. She places the tall can at the other end of the room, under another table, so it can be overlooked. I rescue it. I hover with it, my finger on the trigger.
    “Shall I spray a little for you? It makes the furniture shinier.”
    “No, no, don’t bother. Don’t bother yourself. I don’t like it. I don’t like any of it.”
    “Oh dear. What’s the matter? Are you tired? Would you like to go and sit down?”
    “Certainly not. I’m fine. I’m in the prime of life. I’m not going to let a little thing like the woman get me down.”
    “Woman?”
    “The woman. She comes here. She tells me what I’m to do and I’ve to do it if there isn’t to be trouble.”
    She’s talking about me. Doubt surges in. I thought she liked to clean. I thought it made her happy. That’s the only reason I bought the spray.
    “Stop then,” I tell her, taking hold of her hand. “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really need doing again. You did it yesterday. It’s fine.”
    She throws the duster across the hall. “This is not my job. I wasn’t brought here to do all the work and I’m not doing it.”
    “Come on. Let’s go and find Morris.”
    “He’s a lazy bugger, that one. Old buggerlugs. All he does is sit there.”
    “Well, he has bad legs,