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Stripping the Past

Tim Newton Anderson

    June 26, 2015
    I need to start writing things down before they are lost forever. The doctor confirmed today that I am showing signs of early stage Alzheimer’s.
    I have noticed the signs for months, but put them down to my age. My short term memory has never been that good. I have had a lifetime of going into a room and forgetting what I came into, or going to the shops and not buying some essential item. Janet used to tease me about it – many a meal has meant two trips to the supermarket because I didn’t get the right herbs or vegetables. Lately it has been getting worse, however. Not just the odd memory lapse around the house or losing track of time when I’m busy writing, but those horrible blank moments when you know you have forgotten something important but can feel only the absence of information where it should be.
    I knew something was really wrong the third time I looked for something and couldn’t see it, but went back a short time later and saw it was exactly where I thought it should be. Once or twice may be just miss-seeing, but the third time I realised my mind had been looking at my coffee cup but the information had not registered in my brain. It wasn’t hidden behind or under anything and the white mug should have stood out on the mahogany table. It was only when I moved my hand above the table’s surface and touched the thing that it suddenly re-appeared in my vision.
    Dr Hargreaves tried to reassure me it may just be a temporary issue caused by stress or some other problem like a urinary infection, but I knew in my heart it was the start of dementia. I have seen this before when my late mother in law developed Alzheimer’s, and I recognise the symptoms. That had been so painful to watch. Layer after layer of her personality unpeeled and she deteriorated in just six months from a witty, independent person to a frightened child in an 86 year old body. In the final stages she had not only forgotten who I was, but didn’t know her husband and daughter, and then her own parents, had died. Every day she asked for them, and every day she was forced to relive the trauma of their passing. I prayed then that I would avoid the same fate, and there has been a biting knot in my stomach and a relentless feeling of nausea since I realised I was travelling down the same dark road to oblivion.
    I have Googled Alzheimer’s, of course. As I already knew, there is no cure, and not much that can be done to slow its progress. I need to put some strategies in place to deal with this and spare my daughter the pain I suffered when I tried to look after Margaret – seeing a person I loved dissolving before my eyes in a flood of forgetting.
    June 27, 2015
    I couldn’t sleep at all last night, thoughts rattled around inside my head, and I was in and out of bed, pacing the floor, drinking tea, sitting at my desk and scribbling notes to myself. I suppose in some way I should be grateful I can still think. How much longer will that last? With luck, it could be years, but I’m not sure that would really be that lucky. Perhaps a quick deterioration would be better, like Margaret’s. Less time for Morag to have to visit me in a care home, vainly trying to coax a conversation out of someone who has mentally left the world of today and just exists as an empty shell staring mindlessly at the television until they are helped back into bed by some minimum wage care assistant. Morag would be financially better off as well – no nursing home eating into her inheritance and swallowing up the family home in bills.
    I’ll have to tell her at some point, but I don’t want to do it yet. The condition is not too bad, and as long as I remember enough to know what’s wrong with me I can put coping strategies in place. This diary is one of those, to try and get as much down as possible while I can still access the information. I’ll go out and get a big bundle of post it notes later – I’ve already put some around the house to remind me to get some more. If I write out things I need to do as I think of them, it should help me bring them to mind. If I can see the post it notes, of course. If they don’t start to vanish from my vision as if they have been granted the power of temporary invisibility. The next steps are to go through and annotate all of the old photographs so I have a memory book, and to go through all of the boxes of stuff I’ve accumulated over the years to pick out things that spark specific memories, or are items I will need. It will be a bit like making a Memory Palace in reverse. Instead of having an imaginary mansion in my mind where things I want to remember are associated with bits of furniture or paintings, I will try and place memories around the home so events will be brought to life when I see them.
    June 28, 2015
    I spent all day going through photographs and putting them in an album I bought when I got the post it notes, along with captions telling me who is in the pictures and the occasion they were taken. Then I went through boxes and drawers and pulled out stuff that was significant – my degree and journalist proficiency certificates, my marriage, Morag’s bronzed baby shoes, nick nacks Janet and I bought on holidays then put away as new stuff replaced them. Perhaps the mind is like our house, memories accumulate and get stuffed into distant corners as new ones come along, until eventually there is no room for anything new. But you can’t take old thought to a car boot sale to create more space.
    There are some things I am content to forget – all the useless trivia my brain has accumulated over the years which is great during a pub quiz, but takes up space the rest of the time. Some things I must remember – holding Morag in my arms when she was born, the wonderful times I spent with her as she grew into the wonderful woman she is now, the elation I felt when my first book was published and I held that in my hands. I always found it strange that although I remember the plot and even key phrases of every book or story I’ve written, I can never remember the actual writing process – as if the thoughts vanish from my mind as they travel through my fingers on the keyboard into the computer’s memory. When I sat down to edit, I was often surprised at what I had created – certainly at how good it seemed to be. I knew it had come out of my brain, but it could almost have been written by someone else. It is certainly true that the act of writing often seems to bypass the conscious mind and travel straight from the imagination to the page with only the physical act of typing to mediate it.
    And there are things I would definitely prefer to forget. Janet’s death being the main one. If Alzheimer’s is like a kind of resident mischievous spirit in the brain – stealing things away and sometimes bringing them back, then the cancer that killed Janet was like a cuckoo in her body – growing ever fatter and filling it with poisonous crap until it was uninhabitable. Demanding attention all the time until she and I spent our whole days feeding its insatiable growth and Janet died, worn out from supporting it. A large part of me died for many years, too. I was still there for Morag as she went through university but I withdrew from any emotional contact with anyone else and was relieved as well as delighted when she married Paul as it meant I had space to deal with my own pain. Of course by then that part of me had atrophied and I never really got back in touch with my emotions – I learned to fake when I had to, and what little real feeling I had left was pushed into my books. I feel as if I didn’t give Morag the support she deserved, so how can I ask her to support me?
    June 29 2015
    The other thing I would happily forget is my childhood. Yet it now seems to be coming back to haunt me. I know from my experience with Margaret and my reading on the internet that sooner or later I will become that angry adolescent and unhappy child once more as the Alzheimer’s peels off the layers of learning how to be the person I am today – or was until a few months ago when the first symptoms showed themselves. When I looked in the bathroom mirror this morning I saw myself as I was at 16 for a few seconds, before my usual haggard face reappeared. The online information says hallucinations are common – although not usually until the later stages.
    My sixteen year old self looked pissed off at the person I’ve become. He wanted to fight back at the world- especially the selfish drunken bastards who had brought him up. Harry Potter had been put into a cupboard under the stairs. The young Billy Jordan had put himself there as it was the only safe place away from the drunken rows, thrown crockery and flailing fists. He could listen to his radio on earphones, read, or do his homework in relative quiet, although his stomach was always gripped with the fear of what would be waiting for him when he came out. If he was lucky, he would be ignored as his mother and father argued between themselves, or groped each other in the inevitable cycle of violence and sex they had created for each other. Even being hit for supposedly starting the argument, or some other imaginary transgression was not too bad – pain and bruises faded. The worst thing was that his father would often tear up his book and destroy his homework – being clever was somehow an affront to his father’s core personality. Instead of being pleased his son had the potential to do better than his parents, his father saw it as a deliberate insult.
    I suppose I shouldn’t talk about myself in the third person, although I did all the time in my books. Lots of my characters had a large bit of me at their core, even if the books were not strictly autobiographical. Perhaps that’s what’s happening now – I’ve spread myself over dozens of people in sixteen novels and they have taken those parts of me away somewhere.
    July 27 2015
    It is a month since my last entry – since I told Morag about the condition things have been busy with tests, diagnoses, second opinions and tears. Understandably, she found it hard to accept firstly that my condition was real, and secondly that there was nothing that could be done. She is young enough to believe in the miracles of modern science, and was pained enough by her mother’s death that she is terrified of losing her other parent. In some ways my condition must be harder to accept than Janet’s. Death was not inevitable for years and she had periods in remission, thanks to chemo and radiotherapy. That was a more obvious killer, as well. The sunken features and obvious pain made it clear from one look that Janet was suffering something terrible. On the outside I look the way I have always done, and although my forgetfulness is getting worse and worse, I seem physically fine. Morag and I have had long talks – more than we have had for years, and more intense and emotional than any time since her mother’s death closed down that part of my personality. It seems ironic that I am giving more of myself to my daughter as I lose myself to Alzheimer’s.
    I can perceive the difference in myself, however. I have destroyed several meals and two pans when even the presence of post it notes everywhere failed to remind me in time to take things out of the oven or off the hob. My sixteen year old self has been back in the mirror, too. Young Billy. Or shit face to his parents. His reflection has stared accusingly back at me half a dozen times – asking me why I just ran away after university and didn’t try to tackle the vicious cycle at home and try and save the parents he still loved even while hating them so much. I had decided that part of my life was dead, and created a new William Jordan hundreds of miles away. A confident, successful journalist and then a best selling novelist. I smiled at the world while my mother died of heart failure brought on by drink and drugs, and my father killed himself because he couldn’t live without the woman he had abused but depended on for all those years. I didn’t go to my mother’s funeral – my father didn’t tell me she had died – and only attended his because I wanted to make sure he was really gone.
    Perhaps this is young Billy’s revenge on his adult self for wiping his memory from my CV. I seem to have had a lifetime of avoiding dealing with trauma and burying it away. When the time comes for me to forget Janet’s death and be reminded by Morag or some nurse, will I mourn properly this time and acknowledge how big a piece was torn from my soul when the cancer took her away from me?
    August 15 2015
    Another big gap in this journal to match the big gaps that are appearing in my mind. I know memories are not actually being lost – it is just the pathways that are going as a sort of plaque called beta-amyloids build up and prevent signals being passed properly. The process of transferring short term to long term memory is disrupted, and the routes to key memories are blocked forever.
    The latest stomach churning panic occurred when I tried to write the last journal entry and found some of the letters had disappeared from the keyboard. I suppose I should have tried to write a journal without them – a sort of OULIPO exercise like Perec’s La Disparation which avoids the use of the letter E. Instead it threw me into a deep dark despair. I could cope with the odd kitchen accident or forgetting people’s names, but a writer is not just what I am, it is who I am. If I can’t put thoughts down on paper I’m not me anymore.
    For days I was unable to type without seeing those voids on the keyboard – not always the same letters but always at least one missing. I couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to eat, and I not only still saw young Billy in the mirror, I seemed to sense him around the house out of the corner of my eye. He would be lurking in the shadows, or playing some cruel game of hide and seek, mirroring my movements behind my back and always moving quickly enough to keep in the blind area behind my head. If I tried to go to sleep I would sense his presence staring down at me in my bed, only to vanish if I opened my lids.
    I have managed to hide all of this from Morag and her family when they come to visit. I keep setting alarms on my phone to tell me she will be arriving in an hour and I try and quickly tidy up and flick through the memory album to prod my poor crumbling brain into some semblance of the person I was. The effort exhausts me and as soon as they go, reassured that Dad is coping, I have to lie down and cry with despair at what I am becoming. Young Billy seems to be standing there and laughing at me – telling me it is my fault for pushing away my past. Soon, he seems to say, I will take over and you will be the memory. The anger and rage that has sustained him in the dark corner where I banished him will give him the strength to rip free and push aside this old man with his crumbling mind. I know this is a fantasy, but it still scares me to the core of my being.
    August 30 2015
    I only know the date from the details at the bottom of my computer screen. I have lost whole days in a daze of forgetfulness. I have a health visitor now, thanks to Morag, who comes in every other day to check up on me. I know this because I wrote it down on a post it note, not because I can remember it. Almost as soon as she leaves I must lose all memory of her visit. When she opens the door with her key, I know I know her on some level, but without her greeting of “Hello Mr Jordan, it’s just Katy the Health Visitor,” I would be none the wiser.
    I shouldn’t be getting this much worse this quickly. Not according to either the doctor or the internet. The process is supposed to be much slower and less vicious than this. They want to send me for a brain scan to see what is happening – not that they think they can do anything about it, but for research purposes. Knowing my plight may help them understand some other poor bastard who is suffering from this doesn’t really help – especially as that understanding will only mean they can diagnose the condition more effectively, not cure it.
    I wanted to get some more thoughts down as this is a good day. Perhaps the memories have found another route to the surface, the way the brain relearns to use muscles after a stroke burns out the normal pathways. It won’t be for long, though. The crap covering my synapses will soon spread to block off that way too. I feel like I am cut adrift over a sunken city – I know it is down there but I can’t get to its treasures.
    September 2 2015
    Another good day for writing, but a bad one in every other way. I finally confessed to Morag my difficulties with the letters on the laptop and she installed a voice recognition programme so all I have to is open it and click on the icon and whatever I say gets translated into Word – after I taught it to recognise my voice. I’m not sure I recognise me any more so it is a miracle that my computer can.
    My physical health is starting to suffer as well as my mental wellbeing. Katy the Health Visitor brings me meals and heats them in the microwave, but unless I eat them while she is here to remind me, they sit unopened on the kitchen top. When I do see them I hide them in the bin, worried it will make Morag decide to put me in a care home so I can be looked after. I couldn’t stand that. At least my memory album and the post it notes and the cheap treasures of my past on the shelves are helping me preserve a bit of myself against the constant onslaught of Young Billy. If I am stuck in a home there will be nothing to tell me who I am and he will move to the front of my mind and take over. I feel sorry for young Billy – he had a shit life which he didn’t deserve and all that anger is understandable – but I can’t let him take away the last sixty years of my life. I achieved things. I created a daughter and have a grandson I adore. I was a good husband to a wonderful woman that I have to remember. Just because he is in pain doesn’t entitle him to take all that away from me.
    I know this is paranoia brought on by my condition, but every now and again a wave of hate for my younger self overwhelms me. I become convinced that he is not just metaphorically stealing my personality away, but literally. And he is the one who has been hiding things – spiriting them away to his invisible world and then slipping them back to confuse and upset me. I’m not sure he was a nicer person. He had reasons for his anger, but he sometimes took that misery out on others – bullying younger children in the playground because they had happy homes and he didn’t. Passing on the pain from his father’s beatings as though he were just some kind of intermediary not the instigator. I’m trying to understand him, but its hard after all of these years – even when I get a sudden flash of recall and can clearly visualise my father in one of his drunken rages, throwing Billy down on the floor and kicking him and hitting him with his belt. If the me I have worked hard to develop over all these years disappears – the good husband and father and kind, considerate if a bit cold person I believed myself to be – I don’t want to be left with just that rage and those horrible memories. I can kid myself I am coping a lot of the time, but then that terrible fear and terror overwhelms me and I can’t get what I will become out of my mind. I cry and shake with sobbing. Thank God I’ve managed to avoid that when Morag is here.
    September 10 2015
    No entries for a couple of days – no, over a week according to the date on the laptop. I’ve lost another precious period to black despair and exhaustion. I doze rather than sleep and wake shivering. I had a narrow escape the other day when the alarm on my phone didn’t wake me when Katy was due, and she found me asleep on the living room settee. Luckily I was able to pull myself together and appear reasonably alert. I think Young Billy was trying to sabotage me. He wants to be in a home and get the kind of attention he was denied as a child. Even the comfort of strangers is better than beatings.
    I sense him everywhere, and see him in every reflective surface – not just the mirror in the bathroom. And those accusing stares last longer and longer. I can no longer dispel them with a blink. I have almost forgotten what my adult face looks like. When I do see it I am shocked for a moment how old I look. My face should be covered in pimples not lines and liver spots.
    He is stealing more and more from my mind, and looking through the memory album doesn’t help me as much as it did. Even with the captions to tell me who the people in the picture are, I have no real memory of them or what they meant to me. They may as well be characters in my books. I know the older ones – Janet and her parents and the young Morag, but not the people who stand beside them. I am only holding myself together by willpower – one thing that Young Billy and I share. But how long will I be able to keep up the pretense to Morag and Katy? And how will Morag cope when her father slips back in time to end up mentally younger than her own son? How will she explain it to Liam that this dying shell only looks like his grandfather and is in fact someone else he never knew. Can I trust Young Billy to behave well towards my family or will he swear at them and try and attack them the way his father did? How can I protect them from him?
    September 12 2015
    I am ready for him. My time of clear thinking is getting less and less – Katy was looking at me a strange way when she came with the food and medicine today. She has just left. As she was leaving she was on her phone and I think she is going to get me into a home. She probably thinks it is in my best interest, but it isn’t. It’s in his interest – Young Billy. He will love that. He will probably let me out every now and then just to torture me as our body slumps in front of a television set. Not enough to take control of my body and do anything – just enough to be able to see and hear what is happening and know what has become of me. He will swear and shout at my daughter and grandson when they come to visit and I will be locked in and unable to stop him. That will be a living hell far worse than he suffered in his childhood. He may have been able to imagine a different world, but that only provided hope. All he will leave me is despair.
    I am standing by the bathroom mirror. The laptop cable was long enough to let me bring it in here and record this. Hopefully Morag will understand that I’m trying to save her from a long drawn out pain by hurting her now. She will think of something to tell Liam about his granddad.
    The open razor is in my hand – I’ve not used it for years but managed to find it at the back of the bathroom cupboard.
    Sometime soon I will see him in the mirror – taking over my image the way he is taking over my mind. With that snarling face and his jealousy of what I have made of my life. And when I see it I will strike while I still have the will and strength to do so. If I must go, I will take him with me. And end both of our pain.

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