Still Alice Page 0,24
repetitive motor disturbances, sleep disruptions, changes in eating. She felt tempted to fill in the answers herself, to demonstrate that she was actually perfectly fine and that Dr. Davis must be wrong. Then she remembered his words: You may not be the most reliable source of what’s been going on. Maybe, but then she still remembered he’d said that. She wondered when the time would come that she wouldn’t.
Her knowledge of Alzheimer’s disease admittedly swept the surface only lightly. She knew that the brains of Alzheimer’s patients had reduced levels of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter important in learning and memory. She also knew that the hippocampus, a sea-horse-shaped structure in the brain critical for the formation of new memories, became mired in plaques and tangles, although she didn’t really understand what plaques and tangles were exactly. She knew that anomia, a pathological tip of the tongue, was another hallmark symptom. And she knew that someday, she’d look at her husband, her children, her colleagues, faces she’d known and loved forever, and she wouldn’t recognize them.
And she knew there was more. There were layers of disturbing filth to uncover. She typed the words “Alzheimer’s disease” into Google. Her middle finger was poised over the return key when two jolting knocks caused her to abort the mission with the speed of an involuntary reflex and hide the evidence. Without further warning or waiting for an answer, the door opened.
She feared her face read stunned, anxious, devious.
“Are you ready?” asked John.
No, she wasn’t. If she confessed to John what Dr. Davis had told her, if she gave him the Activities of Daily Living questionnaire, it would all become real. John would become the informant, and Alice would become the dying, incompetent patient. She wasn’t ready to turn herself in. Not yet.
“Come on, the gates close in an hour,” said John.
“Okay,” said Alice. “I’m ready.”
FOUNDED IN 1831 AS AMERICA’S first nonsectarian garden cemetery, Mount Auburn was now a National Historic Landmark, a world-renowned arboretum and horticultural landscape, and the final resting place for Alice’s sister, mother, and father.
This was the first time that her father would be present on the anniversary of that fateful car accident, dead or otherwise, and it irritated her. This had always been a private visit between her and her mother and sister. Now, he would be there, too. He didn’t deserve to be.
They walked down Yew Avenue, an older section of the cemetery. Her eyes and pace lingered as they passed the familiar headstones of the Shelton family. Charles and Elizabeth had buried all three of their children—Susie, just a baby, maybe a stillbirth, in 1866; Walter, age two, in 1868; and Carolyn, age five, in 1874. Alice dared to imagine Elizabeth’s grief by superimposing her own children’s names on the gravestones. She could never hold the macabre images for long—Anna blue and silent at birth; Tom dead, probably following an illness, in his yellow feetie pajamas; and Lydia, rigid and lifeless after a day of coloring in kindergarten. The circuits of her imagination always rejected this sort of gruesome specificity, and all three of her children animated quickly back to the way they were.
Elizabeth was thirty-eight when her last child died. Alice wondered whether she tried to have more children but could no longer conceive, or whether she and Charles started sleeping in separate beds, too scarred to risk the purchase of another tiny headstone. She wondered whether Elizabeth, who lived twenty years longer than Charles, ever found comfort or peace in her life.
They continued in silence to her family’s plot. Their gravestones were simple, like granite Brobdingnagian shoe boxes, and stood in a discrete row under the branches of a purple-leaf beech tree. Anne Lydia Daly, 1955–1972; Sarah Louise Daly, 1931–1972; Peter Lucas Daly, 1932–2003. The low-branched beech tree towered at least one hundred feet above them and wore beautiful, glossy deep purplish green leaves in the spring, summer, and fall. But now, in January, its leafless, black branches cast long, distorted shadows on her family’s graves, and it looked perfectly creepy. Any horror movie director would love that tree in January.
John held her gloved hand as they stood under the tree. Neither of them spoke. In the warmer months, they’d hear the sounds of birds, sprinklers, grounds crew vehicles, and music from car radios. Today, the cemetery was silent but for the distant tide of traffic beyond the gates.
What did John think about while they stood there? She never asked him. He had never met her mother