But Her Alzheimer’s Is Too Advanced

Fuheis, Jordan – October 2020

Yesterday I took Auntie Rula for a walk around sunset time. There were little bits of pale yellow cloud swimming easily in the sky, lit up by the setting sun behind the old cement factory.

We wandered up and down the steep, unyielding hills of Fuheis, the little town on the outskirts of Amman where Raja’s parents live. She went slow on the up hills.

My mother-in-law, who I never got to know before she got sick, doesn’t know my name. She can guess it every one out of ten times. In her late sixties, she has silvery hair and a kind face. She’s quick to smile.

Raja and I go over to his parents’ house about three times per week, driving out to Fuheis from Amman. Though his father, Ibrahim, is healthy, he can’t keep up with Rula’s constant needs and he struggles to run the household on his own. We cook for them, we bathe her, we change her adult diapers since she became incontinent, we take her for walks. We give Ibrahim a much-needed break from her endless loops.

When I take Auntie Rula, as I call her, on walks, she tends to recite one line over and over again. Her line is, “Now we will go home.” Sometimes it is a statement, and other times a question.

“Now we will go home,” she tells me firmly, as we climb hills slowly and descend them incrementally less slowly. Other times she seems to be seeking reassurance. “Now we will go home?”

“Yes,” I tell her, “Now we will go home, after we walk a bit.”

I don’t know why, but it’s important to me that she knows I married her son. Raja and I are only eight months into our beautiful marriage. I want her to know, but she doesn’t. It’s too late for that, I think, with her Alzheimer’s being very advanced, nine years after her diagnosis. But I keep trying anyway.

I ask her if she knows my name.

“Yes,” she says. “Christina.” The name of her other son’s wife.

“No,” I tell her. “I am not Christina. I am Geor…” I trail off to let her finish it.
“Georgie?” she asks.

“Yes!” I answer with a big smile. With Auntie Rula, I take the little sparks of joy when I can get them. “Georgie. That’s right. I’m Raja’s wife.”

Usually this pronouncement is greeted with silence. Sometimes with a high-pitched giggle. She giggles when she is confused. Once when I told her who I was, she repeated, “Raja’s wife?”

For some reason, I’m determined that she know I am now a part of her family. Perhaps it is because I don’t want her to think I’m a stranger when I’m bathing her, putting out lunch for her or taking her to the bathroom. Or perhaps it is just to talk to her about something off-script. Her script is very limited now.

Sometimes while we walk, I feel the need to explain it all. “You know me and Raja got married?” I ask her. “We got married on February 28 of this year. It was such a freezing cold day in Boston. I wish you could have been there – you and Ibrahim. You guys would have liked it, I think.”

“Now we will go home?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “Anyway, it was freezing cold, and our pictures turned out all funny from the wind. Our hair was blowing everywhere! We only had a small group for our civil wedding. My family was there, and just three friends. But next year—”

“Now we will go home.”

“Yes, now we will go home. So next year we want to have our bigger celebration. We’ll do a church wedding and reception and everything. It will be really nice! We will have—”

“Now we will go home?”

Yes, Auntie Rula. Now we will go home.

I give up on my story and lapse into silence for the rest of our walk.

Sometimes, sitting in the living room of Raja’s parents’ house, I look up and find her studying my face. I smile. She smiles back. She is always welcoming, though she doesn’t seem to know who I am.

Her Alzheimer’s was already advanced when I met Raja, so I never knew her as a healthy woman and she never imprinted me in her older memories, the ones that the disease has not yet erased. She is trying to place me. She is not hostile; she is confused.

When she walks into a room and finds me there, chopping onions or talking to Raja or checking my phone, she always tells me, “Nice to have you!” in a sing-song voice with her voice swinging up on the “have”. It seems to be her knee-jerk reaction to finding someone she believes to be a stranger in the house, chopping onions. An automatic politeness.

She means it in the immediate sense, but I pretend she means it in the broader sense, as her newest daughter-in-law. “It’s nice to have you too, Auntie Rula,” I tell her, and pat her on the shoulder as she walks past.

I am hoping – foolishly – that something will click for her when it comes to our wedding, to who I am.

“I’m Raja’s wife,” I’ll say to her a thousand times on a thousand walks, and I’ll tell her about our freezing cold wedding day in Boston, on February 28, and how the pictures turned out funny from the wind. I’ll tell her how our hair was blowing everywhere, and how we wish she could have been there. She’ll say, “Now we will go home.”

But on a deeper level, I pretend to myself, she will start to get it. Maybe one day when I say, “Do you know who I am?”

She’ll say, “Oh yes, I know. You’re Georgie – Raja’s wife. It’s nice to have you.”