Time to Let Go

by Christoph Fischer

  Hanna suggested that Walter should continue to prepare the daily rations beforehand but hide the containers but he pointed out that Biddy could easily find them, too. That he was worried of misplacing and losing them was something he kept to himself. His daughter didn’t need to worry about him and his fear of his own forgetfulness on top of everything else. Walter actually found comfort in the routine of counting out the tablets on a daily basis but he did not want to admit this to her either. Yes, he was behaving like many retired men his age: rigid, repetitive and addicted to routine. It may be true that he was getting on a bit, but it still hurt to be treated like a cliché by his own flesh and blood. Despite his age, his muscles were still pretty well defined and his body fat was minimal; if only he did not have that little tire shape around his waist. At almost 6 foot he made a fine and fit impression and he moved with the confidence of a man in full possession of body and mind. His leathered skin was tanned and maybe a little dry, yet free of broken capillaries and age spots that so many of his friends had in excess. It might well be that his sticking to a regular schedule was what had helped him maintain such excellent health, so there was no reason to ridicule him for it.

  With a cup of coffee for Biddy in his hand he stormed back up the stairs and woke up his sweetheart.

  “Biddy, darling, get up, it is almost 7am!”

  Slowly his wife opened her eyes and took a long look at Walter. Abruptly she sat up and asked him, “What day is it today?”

  “It is Wednesday, sweetheart!”

  “Do I have to get up?” she asked him with surprise in her voice.

  “Yes,” Walter confirmed, then handed her the coffee. “When you are ready come downstairs with me and have some breakfast.”

  She took a sip from the mug, sighed with pleasure, then put on her morning robe and came out of the bedroom with her husband.

  Biddy was considerably smaller than her husband and her head fitted perfectly against his shoulder as she leaned against him and took hold of his hand with hers. Her once brunette hair was pure white now but it still had great volume; she had put on some weight around her waist since she was no longer so active but she was still slim and appeared tiny. She had a round and naturally smiley face. Walter thought he could feel her warm smile and sweet hazel eyes even though he could not see her face below.

  As they came out of the bedroom, the bathroom door was opposite but there were parts of the hallway and doors on either side; the place where the stairs led downstairs was not easily recognisable from this spot.

  “Which way do you want me to go? To the left here or to the right?”

  “Left here, to the stairs. The kitchen is downstairs,” Walter said warmly. “You must know the way. This is your house, darling. It has been for decades. Try to remember. Come, I’ll show you.” Walter gently led her towards and down the stairs.

  His son Henrik had nagged Walter many times to make big signs everywhere. Since Biddy could still read he had suggested that the doors should say ‘Bath’ or ‘Bedroom’ in big letters and large paper arrows should point towards the stairs.

  Walter hated the idea. He was far too proud of the house to spoil it with such unattractive signs. It had a lovely crisp interior, it was spacious, detached with surrounding gardens, and built with the lime stone look that was so typical for the area. It was part of the charm of the town and Walter was very pleased how his relatively modern home blended in so nicely, looking genuine and classically English, and so much larger than the many ‘two up two down’ terraced houses. However, because of the unusual layout of the house and the hidden stairs, it was a regular occurrence for Biddy to get lost upstairs, especially in the mornings. Many times he had found her sitting in his study or the guest rooms, wondering where she was. Hanna had joined her brother’s plea and pointed out that he should at least secure the house in other ways, like a gas detector, so that Biddy could not come to harm. Walter, however, insisted that all of those concerns were premature and ridiculous.

  “What do you want for your breakfast? Toast or cereal?” he asked his wife once they were in the kitchen.

  “I would love some toast.” Biddy said and sat down on the wooden bench by the kitchen table.

  Walter went to the cupboard for the bread and put it in the toaster. As he turned around he found Biddy lying on the bench, already nodding off again.

  “You have got to get up. Biddy! Wake up! Come on. Let’s not have the same silly game every morning!” he called out to her, shaking her and lifting her back up. “You’ve got to sit upright!”

  “Oh, I am sleepy,” she said sheepishly. “What day is it today?”

  “Wednesday,” he said with a hint of irritation. “I just told you. Drink your coffee. That will wake you up.”

  “Could I have something to eat? Just tell me where everything is,” she said looking around the place with wide, child-like eyes.

  “I have just put some bread in the toaster for you,” Walter told her.

  “What an excellent idea. I like toast.”

  “Yes, I am good like that!” he said under his breath.

  Biddy took the knife by her plate, reached for the butter and started to spread it on her hand. When Walter turned back from the work surface with her toasted bread she looked at it with amazement and said: “But I already have some, look!” and she showed him her hand.

  “Oh, you silly woman!” Walter put her toast on the plate and gave her a kitchen roll to clean her hand. “Of course, you could not wait, could you! Oh dear, the things you get up to!” he scolded her but when Biddy started to giggle he had a little grin on his face as well.

  “What do you want to do today? Do you want to go into town? We could take the bicycles and get some exercise,” he suggested.

  “Which town are you talking about? I hope it is not too far,” Biddy said.

  “I mean our town, Biddy, the town centre. What do you say?”

  “I don’t know. How far is it?”

  “It is very close to here. Twenty minutes.”

  “That’s handy,” she said enthusiastically. “Let’s do it.”

  “First we finish our breakfast and get you washed,” Walter said.

  “Of course,” said Biddy and started to butter the toast. This time she got it right.

  Satisfied that his wife would now be able to carry on with her breakfast without his supervision he went to pick up the newspaper which was delivered to the house every morning. He was not really interested in the world of politics any more, not even the local developments, but Biddy could still read and enjoyed doing so very much. At times, when he needed her to be occupied, the newspaper could act as a pacifier of sorts, however much he hated to see it that way.

  Walter loved reading the weekly local paper for its obituaries and other social and community announcements, but that was not out until tomorrow. His family had established itself here over several decades and was fairly well known in certain circles. That brought with it a responsibility to keep an eye out for announcements of births, marriages or deaths.

  Biddy had never failed to write a card or show up at a funeral to represent the family. Now that she was no longer able to do this, he wanted to keep up the appearance of a caring and community spirited family.

  Attending funerals or a christening ceremony was tricky for Walter because he would have to organise someone to look after his wife. The last time he had taken her to a funeral she had been on particularly bad form and her behaviour could almost have been described as disruptive to the ceremony. The deceased had been a friend of Biddy’s, a woman from her outdoors bowling group, who had succumbed to breast cancer. Walter had to explain to his wife three times why they were at the cemetery. Each time Biddy burst into tears for her friend, only to forget about it and ask again who was being put to rest.

  She relived the pain of losing her friend several times that day and Walter worried that her outbursts and agitated state may have upset the bereaved relatives. Were it not for such behaviour
he would have preferred to take her with him to these events to keep a sense of continuity for her. He was convinced that the longer she did the things she had done all of her life, the better it was for her condition. Of course, he had to draw the line where other people were affected, like bereaved families.

  The newspaper today had nothing to say that concerned him, he found out from a quick look through the pages. Arsenal, his favourite football team had lost, but he had already known that from the radio. He had just wondered how the journalists would take the news and how harsh they would be on the coach and the players for the few missed opportunities during the match. Displeased with the level of criticism and unfairness in the review he put the paper away and after Biddy had finished her second slice of toast he ushered his wife back upstairs into the bathroom for her morning ablutions, as Walter still liked to call it.

  “Thank you!” she said as she entered the bathroom. “Did I bring a toothbrush or can I borrow one?”

  “You can borrow one of mine,” he said. “Look, take this one. You had it the last time you stayed here with us,” and handed her her own.

  “Great. You have thought of everything,” Biddy said happily.

  Walter left her in the bathroom and went across the hall into their bedroom to make up the bed and tidy the room. His daughter Hanna had told him many times he should not bother and that there were enough other and more important chores to be done in the house; besides, no visitor was ever going to enter the master bedroom. To Walter, however, this was a matter of principle; whether you carried yourself with dignity or whether you let yourself go in old age: “If I wanted to live slovenly like a gypsy I would have bought a caravan a long time ago instead of this house”, was his usual replied to her criticism.

  When he got back to the bathroom he was pleased to find that Biddy had managed to switch the shower off and was standing on the bath mat and drying herself. He felt a surge of gratefulness that despite the many trials her disease brought to their lives there were often moments of clarity and his wife could surprise him with the immaculate execution of routine tasks and moments of some kind of normality. It was another bone of contention with his son Henrik, who had warned him never to leave Biddy alone in the bathroom or the kitchen. Henrik should be here, now, to see how well everything still went. Biddy had even put her dirty clothes into the laundry basket and was now hanging her towel in the right spot to dry. She had not recognised the family home earlier but she was mechanically following a kind of morning routine. Walter watched her as she put on the clothes he had put out for her the evening before and the slightly irritated mood he had been in earlier disappeared completely.

  “Well done, Biddy!” he said appreciatively. “You are a star today!”

  Biddy came out of the bathroom, eager and energetic, and without help found her way downstairs, whistling a Cliff Richard song.

  “You are in a good mood!” Walter said cheerfully.

  “Yes. I am. I can’t wait to see the town,” she told him.

  Sometimes her attention span could be shorter than that of a goldfish but at other times, like now, she could hold on to the same thought for much longer and almost become obsessed with it. The inconsistency in her memory loss was hard for him to bear: he felt more comfortable with clear and constant parameters in his life.

  Before Biddy had been diagnosed he had read the odd article about the disease in the papers and he knew, vaguely, that there were progressive stages. He guessed there was no denying that his wife had passed the initial stage and was probably somewhere in the early middle or moderate stage of the disease, but he preferred not to know anything else about it.

  It was cruel that there were days when he could be tempted to believe that her fading memory was on the mend, almost promising a complete recovery; then, unpredictably, the disease would take that hope and present him with a shadow of his wife who could be a complete stranger, a child or a lunatic. It was as the doctor had said: “Every patient is different.” So why burden oneself with doom and gloom?

  “Do you feel like cycling or do you want us to take the car?”

  “I would love to cycle. How far did you say it is?” she asked.

  “No more than twenty minutes,” Walter answered.

  “Ok then.”

  The two of them put on their shoes and bicycle helmets and took to the road. Their house was on a quiet residential cul-de-sac with both speed bumps and a lowered speed limit because of a playground at the end of the road. A footpath next to it led to the canal from where one could easily get into town.

  Biddy and Walter had been passionate about sport all of their lives, which was the reason why he tried to get her to do as much exercise as she was willing to take part in. This was another constant part of her life that he wanted to keep up for as long as possible. The speed and the dangerous behaviour of younger and more aggressive cyclists on the path was a bit of a worry but it was the lesser evil for Biddy, compared to a further loss of mental and emotional stability that the abandonment of cycling and her active lifestyle could bring.

  Their trip took them past the local cemetery, a place where Biddy once used to spend a lot of her time, visiting the grave of her mother and her sister, lighting candles and replacing old flowers with fresh ones. Walter tried not to take her there. On a bad day she could go through the same heart-rendering routine and cry and relive the pain of losing the two women again, but if she suggested making a stop he always obliged her, cherishing her initiative and hoping that any connection to the past and her life before the illness was a good thing, even if the occasion was a sad one.

  Today Biddy seemed too involved with observing the wildlife on the canal to notice the cemetery and they arrived in the town centre in almost record time. As had been her habit before the disease, Biddy went straight to the fruit market stand and looked at the prices.

  “Two pounds?” she said, lifting a basket of grapes and pretending to be gasping for air. “No! That should be twenty pence.”

  Walter calculated in his mind when said twenty pence would have been the actual price for grapes. He had found that lately his wife seemed mentally to regress to a certain time or age in her life when she had a better recollection than the confused present time. Depending on the day she could behave as young as a child, as she had done earlier, or a little older, if they were lucky. Maybe, as more and more of her recent memory vanished, she was coping by seeking refuge in an era that - on her personal time line - was safe and so protected from memory loss. Although the progress of this loss was not occurring in a strictly reverse chronological order, from the present towards her childhood, at times it was how one could perceive the development. In that regard, there again was no consistency, however hard he tried to create it. The younger she became in her mind the less he was dealing with an equal or a life partner any more.

  “Biddy don’t worry. I am going to buy grapes in the supermarket later. They are still cheap there. Would you like to feed the ducks now?” he suggested quickly.

  Whenever her world clashed with the details of reality - like now over the price of grapes – she could become agitated and upset. In his eyes some of those clashes justified the risk of pain because he hoped that they might trigger something to bring her into the present time – at least for a moment - but fretting over the price of grapes wasn’t going to help.

  “Yes. Do we have bread?” she asked.

  “Yes, I brought some from the larder.”

  “Oh, you think of everything.”

  For the next half hour he watched his wife as she was talking to and feeding the ducks in a pond in a nearby park. This was a very quiet time of day for the birds. School children were at class and mothers with young ones seemed to come out here a little later than this: the pond was all hers. It amazed him how much joy and entertainment his wife could gain from such a simple thing as feeding the ducks.

  Her zest for life still showed frequently and sometimes even seemed completely unbroken by the dise
ase. When she was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease she had desperately tried to fight it and in the process she had suffered a lot. She had read all the books there were, taken supplements and tried to train her brain with exercises.

  “Come to bed,” Walter had said to her one evening when she had spent several hours in the study with her brain teasers.

  “But I must solve this puzzle,” Biddy shot back at him. “I can’t finish unless I get this right.”

  “Do it tomorrow, love.”

  “No,” Biddy hissed. “I need to do it now.”

  “You are probably too tired to solve it tonight. You need sleep more than this exercise,” Walter tried again.

  “Mind your own business,” she yelled and slammed her fist on the table.

  Walter was so surprised at this uncharacteristic outburst he stood frozen and had no reply ready. While he struggled to come up with a response to this unprecedented shouting over nothing, Biddy doubled over on the desk and started to sob.

  “I can’t do it, Walter,” she cried. “I just can’t do it.”

  “You don’t need to do everything today. Do it tomorrow.”

  “That’s not just it, Walter. I’ve forgotten something else but I can’t remember what it is. I know it is something really important that I must do. I should have written it down.”

  Walter walked up to her and tried to hug her.

  “Get off me,” she screamed and yanked his hand away. “You don’t know what it is like. Don’t patronise me!”

  Walter wanted to shout back at her, to make her snap out of her mood, but he was just too surprised to think of what he could possibly say. His wife had never pushed him away before.