A happy event

She doesn't talk much anymore. But she's glad to see people she knows, and she shows it by walking up close to them, leaning forward, and just smiling at them. She smiles with her whole face -- forehead, eyes and mouth. And she can stand there for a long time.

All the other families know her by name. As they pass by on their way to see their own loved one, they say "Hi May." She's a little slow on the uptake, but she stops and smiles back in their direction as they walk on.

Tuesday night I was a speaker at a dinner event for people who were beginning to consider their next step for a loved one with Alzheimer's. One of the other speakers lit up when he heard I was May's husband. "May looks after Lillian," he said. "She calls Lill her baby. They're really good together." The marketing director said May had helped her fold the napkins for our dinner. I wondered if I would get to see her, because the residents were in their dining room when I arrived.

Most of them start getting ready for bed as soon as they eat, but May was attracted by the hubbub in the Activity Room and came to check it out. The first person she saw was Mel, Lillian's husband. She walked in and stood in front of him and grinned broadly. People were trying to direct her toward where I was sitting. When she finally looked my way, she smiled anew and started shuffling toward me. She sat down next to me and someone brought her a dessert. She stayed for the whole meeting. I spoke first and then went back and sat next to her. She slept through the third speaker, while I rubbed her back with one hand and held her up with the other. She was happy to be there, smiling in her sleep.

'you can't really figure out why...'

A friend sends me a clipping about a study in which Alzheimer's patients were shown sad movies and happy movies. Long after the patients had forgotten what movie they had seen, they still felt happy or sad, depending on the group they were in. And they felt their happiness or sadness more intensely than a control group of individuals with normal memories. "Because you don't have a memory," says the lead author of the study report, "there's this general free-floating state of distress and you can't really figure out why."

I think that's what was going on back in July when May was so agitated: she thought she was supposed to do something, and she didn't know what it was, and she fretted about it with no let-up day after day -- the anxiety living on for days after the cause had been forgotten.

She's been easier in her skin lately. The smile is back. She moves more slowly, and finds it harder to carry on a conversation, and I often find her asleep sitting straight up in her chair, but the edge has been rounded off.

In seven weeks, she will have been living at the residential facility for a year.

Two hairs past a freckle

I was sitting with May in the activities room, watching an episode of I Love Lucy. After a while, she reached haltingly toward my thigh. I looked at her and she said, "I just need to see what time it is." I scooted my chair closer to her. She reached down for the hem of my pants, lifted it up, and stared briefly at my ankle. Then she nodded, put my pant leg back in place, and went back to watching Lucy and Ethel.