Andrea Gillies’s memoir, Keeper, trails awards and awed reviews, and I can see why. Though I wasn’t looking forward to still another account of life with deepening dementia, I read this one in a day.
Gillies’s saga, subtitled One House, Three Generations and a Journey into Alzheimer’s, unfolds on a blustery peninsula in northern Scotland, where she and her husband, their three children and his ailing parents have all moved into a drafty Victorian house miles from anywhere.
Gillies’s father-in-law can barely walk; her mother-in-law, Nancy, is already paranoid and obstreperous. As the author, a journalist, lays out her plan to restore the overgrown garden and take lovely walks by the sea while working at home, caring for old and young and running a bed and breakfast, I could feel my anxiety rising.
How, exactly, was one mortal supposed to manage all that?
As readers here have reason to suspect, unhappy surprises lie ahead. But I kept reading because Gillies is such a gorgeous writer, because Nancy is so compelling in her ferocity, and because their relationship — part dance, part duel — is hard to look away from.
And because Gillies is uncompromising in her honesty. You will not find her going on about how tending to an increasingly demanding and aggressive woman has gladdened her days, or how God never gives us more than we can handle. You will find passages like this, when Nancy is getting increasingly impossible to help and Gillies is awakening on dark mornings with a sense of desperation:
I’m beginning to feel afraid, though it isn’t clear what there is to fear.
That I won’t be able to do it anymore, perhaps. That Nancy will hurt one of the children and that I will hurt her.
That she sees through me, my plastic attempts at love. That this is a test of character that I’m failing, D minus….I’m having thoughts and feelings of which I’m ashamed. Dislike. Resentment. Regret.
Though the passage I’ve chosen isn’t a lot of laughs, Gillies can be darkly funny, too. Can you really laugh about Alzheimer’s? I think a lot of caregivers would say, God help you if you can’t.
Agenda Alzheimer’s addresses the needs of people suffering with the disease and those that care for them.
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