I have no idea how long she’ll be able to continue at Sam’s. He’ll cut her some slack because she’s a dependable, hard worker, but he’s not going to be happy when she forgets to put in breakfast orders and undercharges customers for things she forgot to add to the bill.
We need to stockpile cash while we can.
“Catherine, are you okay? This is all so sudden. Aren’t you supposed to move in, like, ten days?”
I refocus on her. “Yeah. It’s my mom … she’s sick.”
“Oh, no. I’m so sorry.”
Tin seems to be waiting for me to continue, but I can’t.
She finally breaks the silence. “Stay on as long as you want. I can put you on a full-time schedule next month.”
I nod vigorously, hoping the gesture conveys my gratitude, then I stand up and busy myself wiping a few crumbs off the counter.
Tin is one of the people I admire most in the world. She’s only five years older than me, but she has two master’s degrees and oversees a staff of a dozen nurses, assistants, and volunteers. She has a lot of experience comforting distraught family members and works with some of the most challenging cases on the Memory Wing.
If I were going to talk to anyone about what my mother is facing, it would be Tin.
But I can’t, not yet.
Not just because the realization of what my mother will become is so overwhelming that I can only comprehend it in short bursts, as if the knowledge is a series of waves breaking over my head and temporarily snuffing out my ability to see, to hear, to breathe.
It’s also this: Tin will immediately recognize, as I have, that the incurable disease that has slithered through at least one generation of my family—from my grandmother to my mother—may be waiting to strike again.
It may come for me next.
* * *
Tin said I could start work early today, another gesture of kindness. I gather my bag of Goodwill odds and ends and head for the elevator.
The destination for most visitors and employees is floors one through four.
Mine is floor five.
The elevator will take anyone there, but once you step off, you can only walk a few feet before encountering a locked door with a keypad code. Above it, a camera’s unblinking red eye signifies it’s watching your every move.
From the outside, the entrance is clearly visible, with the door’s silver knob contrasting with its beige color.
On the inside, it’s a different story.
I input my code and wait for the lock to click. When it does, I push open the door a few inches, check to make sure no one is on the other side, then walk through and wait for it to shut behind me.
I’m in the Memory Wing.
The wall on this side of the door is painted blue and the door is the exact same hue, knob and hinges and all. No signs indicate this is the way out. There’s a keypad, but it’s also painted blue to blend in. The numbers on the pad are scrambled, with a few positioned upside down.
Unless you know exactly where the exit is and have the ability to decipher a confusing code, it’s virtually impossible to leave this floor. Which is the whole point.
As I move down the short hallway, I hear a woman calling, “Can someone please get me a bellboy?”
I round the corner and encounter Mrs. Dennison, who wears a gold-and-black brocade jacket over stretchy slacks. Her silver hair is in an elegant bob—Mrs. Dennison’s daughter takes her to the salon every two weeks—and her expression brightens when she sees me.
“Miss, can you help me? I’m looking for a bellboy to carry down our luggage.”
“Oh, checkout isn’t for another hour,” I tell her. “I’ll take you to our executive waiting room, where you can enjoy a complimentary beverage and some snacks.”
“That sounds lovely, dear. I just need to go tell my husband.”
Mrs. Dennison allows me to hold her elbow and guide her toward the community room.
“Frank and I had a lovely stay here. Absolutely lovely.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Mrs. Dennison twists her head around. “Where did Frank go?”
When she first arrived on the Memory Wing and asked for her husband, I watched Mrs. Dennison’s daughter explain Frank had died six months earlier. From the pained but weary expression on her daughter’s face, it was clearly a conversation they’d had many times before.
But Mrs. Dennison was essentially hearing it for the first time.
“Oh no!” Her face crumpled. “What happened to my Frank?”
She was completely distraught, moaning and shaking. Then her short-term memory wiped itself clean, and it began again: “Where is Frank?”
One of the finest moments of patient care I’ve witnessed came when Tin stepped in and told Mrs. Dennison’s daughter it would be a kindness to let her mother believe Frank was alive.
“But my mother abhors lying!” Mrs. Dennison’s daughter protested. “My whole life, she has always demanded I tell her the truth!”
Tin held her ground, and now, as far as Mrs. Dennison is concerned, her beloved Frank is always just a room away.
Mrs. Dennison passes the time waiting to be with her husband by taking art classes and enjoying supervised walks in the garden and listening to music. At night, when she is put to bed, she believes Frank is in the bathroom.
It feels like a bit of grace that her damaged brain permits this hologram of Frank to hover nearby. Alzheimer’s has stolen so much from Mrs. Dennison, and it isn’t finished pillaging yet. It’s a voracious, fiendish disease—so cunning that despite more than three billion dollars a year dedicated to research, no one can find a cure or even a way to slow its progression.
My nursing classes taught me how to trace its path of wreckage. It generally strikes the hippocampus first, the region of the mind that’s the Grand Central Station of memory. Its tentacles continue to stretch, wreaking havoc with the intricate, infinitesimally delicate areas governing emotions and movement and the ability to do simple tasks, like use a fork.
In autopsies, even Alzheimer’s brain tissue looks confused, like some monstrous hand reached in and swirled everything around.
I settle Mrs. Dennison into a soft chair by the window in the community room with a cup of warm tea by her side—all water taps on this floor are engineered to never go above 110 degrees—then walk over to Mr. Gray, who has a plastic basket on his lap. I take the socks from my bag, separate them, and add them to the dozen or so pairs in his basket.
“So much laundry to do,” he mutters.
When Mr. Gray grows agitated, which happens a few times a day, we bring out the sock basket. Matching pairs isn’t a tonic for every patient, but working on a concrete task helps center Mr. Gray.
Before he came here, Mr. Gray was an electrical engineer who specialized in the applications of radon. His son once told me that just about everything man sends into space has Mr. Gray’s fingerprints on it.
I watch him now, his tongue tucked in the corner of his mouth as he concentrates on trying to find a partner for the tube stock in his hand with pink-and-blue stripes. Then I distribute the rest of my finds, putting the measuring cups in the bin of odds and ends and setting the plastic doll in a toy crib in a far corner.
I’ll save the Debussy CD for when darkness falls.
That’s when sundowning begins.