As Things Fade by Nishi Pulugurtha

A gentleman in is his late 70s keeps telling his daughter that he wants to go home, to his mother. When asked where his mother is, he says that she is in Patna. He then starts to speak of his naughtiness and how his mother scolds him. He has a tabla teacher, he says, and the teacher will be arriving soon, so he has to be home, or else his mother will scold him. He speaks as if it is in the present.  

Another lady in her 80s is upset and begins to cry. When asked what is troubling her, she says that she is unable to find her mother.. When she is asked about her mother, she begins to speak of her parents, of her brothers running about, climbing trees, catching fish- all the events being set in her village.   

Mashima kept repeating the same thing over and over again. In her conversations, she had no sense of time and place. She could not remember whether she had eaten or not, or, what she had eaten.  These people are not making up stories, their stories are real. Only thing being that they happened in the distant past. 

These are people who will not be able to recall what they ate a little while ago but can talk vividly about their childhood. They will then go on to talk about something absolutely disconnected. A bystander or an acquaintance might not be able to discern anything. The family member knows that the nerves in the brains are causing all this tangling up, this jumbling up of things. With the passage of time, the disconnectedness with the present increases.  

These individuals are affected by dementia.  

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. Named after the German  psychiatrist and pathologist Alois Alzheimer who discovered it, Alzheimer's is a neurological degenerative disease that usually begins slowly and worsens with the passage of time. Dementia is a broader term that is used to refer to brain disorders that affect memory, thinking and behaviour. Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia. Early symptoms of dementia are memory loss; difficultly in doing ordinary, familiar tasks; problems in communicating, and, immense changes in personality. There is no cure for dementia and certainly none for Alzheimer’s. 

One of the most common early symptoms of the disease is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease progresses, symptoms include difficulty with language and words; a sense of disorientation; a tendency to wander off and get lost even in familiar surroundings; depression and mood swings; loss of interest in activities that s/he might have earlier taken a great interest in, and, an inability to take care of one’s daily needs. A person with Alzheimer’s withdraws slowly from family and society. Behavioural issues become prominent – however, it is not true that their cognition has failed completely.  

In the current phase involving Covid_19, for instance, the person would listen to  the news about the pandemic and listen to people talk about it in his/er surroundings. This would make them agitated. They realise something is wrong and are unable to decide what to do about it. Moreover, due to current restrictions, a number of their activities are affected. All these make them even more restless.  

Change is one thing that disturbs anyone with dementia and Alzheimer’s. Unfortunately, change is the common factor in our lives. Moreover, Covid_19 is not a change but an upheaval and this has brought up great difficulties for both the loved one who is affected by Alzheimer’s and the caregiver.  

Amma has Alzheimer’s disease. She is completely quiet these days, it is as if she has forgotten how  to talk. However, there is a faint response when I call out to her and talk to her. As she sits and looks around gently, her hand slowly reaches out. It reaches out to anyone who sits beside her. She holds on to the dress or the saree for quite some time. I guess that she too realizes that we are living in a strange and troubling time.   

Nishi Pulugurtha is an academic and writes on travel, film, short stories, poetry and on Alzheimer’s Disease. Her work has been published in various journals and magazines. She has a monograph on Derozio (2010), guest edited the June 2018 Issue of Café Dissensus and has a collection of essays on travel, Out in the Open (2019). Her recent book is an edited volume of essays on travel, Across and Beyond  (2020). She is now working on her first volume of poems.