What Alzheimer’s Took From Her – And What It Left

Fuheis, Jordan-October 2020

At home in Fuheis, on the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, my mother-in-law “Auntie Rula” paces through the dimly lit rooms. In the living room: a loop around the coffee table, stepping carefully over her husband’s feet while he sits on the couch doing Sudoku. Then on to the dining room, she walks past the dining room table, head down, hands at her sides.

She watches the floor while she walks.

Into the TV room, past the TV, and into her son Bassem’s old bedroom. A small loop around the room, then back out the way she came, through the TV room, past the dining room table, and back into the living room.

The sight of her husband sitting on the couch reminds her to recite her line: “Ibrahim, open the door for me so I can take the garbage out to the dumpster.” She receives no response. She tries again: “Ibrahim, open the door for me so I can take the garbage out to the dumpster.”

We don’t let Auntie Rula take the trash out, however many times she may recite her line, because she would drop the trash bags into the dumpster at the end of the street and then keep walking and get lost. It is simply her line. Of the thousand chores she used to do around the house, for some reason this is the one that has stuck in her memory. The one she always thinks she needs to do.

Why do the tangles of dying nerve cells in her brain, nine years after being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, erase any thoughts of sweeping the floor, or putting groceries away in the cabinets, or hanging laundry out to dry? The only to-do item that seems to remain now, between the tangles, is taking out the trash.

“Where is Bassem?” we sometimes ask her, to test her. I am not sure why we pose her this same question so often, since she fails the test every time.

“At work,” she says.

“Isn’t he in Germany,” we prompt her, “with his wife, Christina?” No answer.

Rula thinks her son Bassem is at work whenever he is not at home, which is almost all the time, since he has been living in Germany for the last six years.

A few years ago, when she was sick but not as sick as she is now, she used to tell some stories. She told the same few stories over and over again, sometimes in Arabic, sometimes in English. She speaks English fluently with a Jordanian accent.

Her stories, back when she told them, were word-for-word the same in each language, and she delivered them quickly, with no apparent breaks between sentences. Her words tripped over one another as they flew out of her mouth, like a race, each trying to beat the others.

One story was about her retirement from De La Salle Frere, the school in Amman where she taught English before she got sick.

“You know when they first asked me to retire I was upset but then I realized it was the Lord’s will because you know my father is an old man now because I am free I go to him I put food for him I take care of him I take him to go get a haircut my dear father you know he did his best for me I have to take care of him now when I make food and have extra I put it in a Tupperware box and bring it to him my dear father I talk too much.”

Each of her stories ended abruptly this way, “I talk too much.” Was it an apology? Self-consciousness? Whatever it was, it always prompted the listener to murmur “no, no,” out of automatic politeness while continuing to mince garlic as she paced in circles around the kitchen table.

A pause.

Then she began again.

“You know when they first asked me to retire I was upset but then I realized it was the Lord’s will because you know my father is an old man now because I am free I go to him I put food for him I take care of him I take him to go get a haircut my dear father you know he did his best for me I have to take care of him now when I make food and have extra I put it in a Tupperware box and bring it to him my dear father I talk too much.”

It sounded as though someone had asked her to tell this story as quickly as she could and was timing her using a stop watch, like an experiment between two bored children on a day home from school. And as if when she finished, the one doing the timing said, “That was pretty good, but I bet you could do it even faster.” She agrees. She will try. She is off!

“You know when they first asked me to retire I was upset but then I realized it was the Lord’s will…”

This story was still true for her, though it was no longer true in her life. She no longer cooked for her father, brought him extra food, or took him to get his hair cut. She told this story when she was doing those things, and she told it when she was no longer doing them after she became too forgetful and couldn’t drive on her own.

She still told the story, later, when her father became old and sick and stopped going on errands, and finally, even after he passed away.

She doesn’t tell her usual stories anymore. Her script is very limited now. “Ibrahim, open the door for me so I can take the garbage out to the dumpster,” is her line when she is pacing in the house.

“I will finish and then I will wash my plate,” is her line when she is eating lunch. She tells me, Raja, and Ibrahim many times over, after every bite or two. “I will finish and then I will wash my plate.” A pause. “I will finish and then I will wash my plate.”

Usually we let her continue looping while we carry on our own conversation: the rising coronavirus cases in Jordan; the upcoming 2020 presidential election in the US; whether or not the fruit vendor had ripe mangoes recently.

She finishes and washes her plate. Then she leaves the kitchen and returns to pacing. In the living room: a loop around the coffee table, then into the dining room, past the dining room table, head down, hands at her sides.

She watches the floor while she walks.