Hundred

(NB - yes, this is far too long, and No, I don't have time to make it shorter. Those not quite interested enough in dementia to read screeds of text, just zip right on to the end....)

My mother in law has lived in a care home for two years now and is burdened by the impulse to leave the building and get home. She has Alzheimer's and has no memory left at all, other than for a half dozen facts from long term memory which flavour the present and of which she is sure. What happens when the abyss of amnesia is opening constantly at your feet, as it appears to with Nancy? Some days it appears that her brain is compensating by creating and supplying its own answers, its own improvisations: fictions that keep her afloat. It isn't that nothing is going on in there, in her brain. She improvises her reality from minute to minute. Something is happening. It hasn't all come to a halt.

Since waking this morning I have thought, apparently randomly, fleetingly, about a hundred insignificant things and in making decisions, reflecting on them, I have become a new person, albeit in a trivial sense. As Heraclitus had it, you can never step into the same river twice. Which rivers does Nancy put a toe in? Which river is she wading in, thigh deep, in those periods of sitting in her chair hand rubbing and looking deep in thought? It's clear from her eye movements, her mouthings, her shifting expressions that something is happening. Are they words, pictures? Is she thinking in the first person, or does her voice come at her like dictation? The little output that does reach us: this is my house; you work for me; I was born here; my father is in the garden; I must get to the office; the friends are on their way - none of this hints at much in the way of a coherent alter-ego. She doesn't claim to be anybody else, other than, on occasion, her younger self, unmarried, unburdened, childless, her whole life ahead of her (and don't we all imagine our immortal souls, our essential selves, to be fixed at around the age of 28?)

Waking this morning and listening to the rain tapping at the windows, I tried to fake being a person without a memory but it was impossible. Everything we are is the sum of our history, augmented by every new experience, each stone added to the cairn, and modified by our thoughts about that stone, and about the shape the cairn is taking. Our selves are fed by our narrative, the story of our past and our imagined futures. Ask me who I am and I turn immediately to memory.

Who I am is what I've done and experienced, and what I think about it all; how other people make me feel about it all, how the books I've read and films I've seen have made me think and feel about it all, creating a unique and labyrinthine web of connections that is My Self. I have a library of self at hand. I can wander the halls of this library and choose whichever bit I like, and read from it and enjoy the indulgence of having new ideas about the past. I find in the last few years that I am dipping into it more and more and finding surprising new connections between things. This, I suppose, is what people mean when they talk about personal growth and one of the few compensations of being post-40.

This morning when I opened my eyes the room I put together was there, the anticipated objects, everything familiar and as it should be: the clean laundry still piled on the chair awaiting sorting; the new handbag hanging from the wardrobe door.

I recognise the handbag. I remember buying it. I don't actually bother to have the memory, in full, of the shopping and acquisition; it's more like, in computer terms, a shortcut on the desktop that I am confident leads to the memory. It's so brief as to be a shortcut to the shortcut. Recognition. It fits into my narrative and that's all that's needed.

Nancy spends a lot of her waking life feeling afraid. The reason I'm not afraid on waking is that, stirring and stretching in bed, everything I see around me is explicable; it was put. Personal history isn't just about the CV, executive or social. We have history with everything surrounding us. The house is one we bought having sold the previous one. Our possessions carry with them their own stories, of how they were acquired and where, and their Thing Biographies, things that have happened since we got them. A chair used for reading is a highly evocative thing, or a sofa owned since the children were small. Look hard at that sofa and you'll see them, little pink and white people, fresh out the bath in clean jammies, waiting for a story. An old pair of jeans carries history with it, that's why they're hard to part with. This isn't just sentimentality, but context. Imagine waking in the morning and finding everything around you is new: the building, the garden outside the windows, the people who talk to you as if you know each other, the shirt the stranger hands you, the chair they take you to, the man sitting in the other chair. If your brain were still intact enough to want to make a history out of things, it might get around the novelty of all this by explaining your real life as Somewhere Else. You are somewhere new and your life is Somewhere Else. All you're going to want to do is get back there.

PS My hundredth blip today. Off now to spread my red balloon around....