Free Sweet Surrender by Mary Moody Page A

this tragic development, could spoil it now.

10
    The Christmas I spent in Canada in 2006 was my first in a cold climate, and it was tremendous fun. We cut a perfect tree from the local Christmas-tree farm, and decorated it with great care. More than twelve of Ken’s relatives were invited for dinner, and everything was organised down to the last bonbon. In Australia, the Christmas feast is traditionally served at lunch, but here in Canada it was an early evening meal of roast turkey with all the trimmings. It was icy cold outside, not snowing, but hovering below zero. There were fires in the two living rooms and the house – like all houses in Canada – is centrally heated and therefore comfortable all year round. The meal seemed more appropriate to this climate than to ours at home, where I am usually sweating over a wood stove on Christmas day with temperatures well over the 30-degree mark.
    It was more than eighteen months since Margaret’s original diagnosis, and even though I had seen her since, when she and Ken had come to Australia for a couple of months to reconnect with brothers Jon and Dan, I was shocked by her deterioration. My sister could put on a show of being totally with it, but in reality she had trouble managing even the most simple tasks, and putting names to faces was almost impossiblefor her. She was able to help me prepare vegetables for dinner, and she could still do the washing up efficiently, but using the stove and coordinating a meal was completely beyond her. She had lost quite a bit of weight and I had trouble convincing her to eat – for breakfast all she would consider was a single kiwifruit and a cup of green tea. Her lack of appetite affected her energy levels and made her appear delicate.
    The most distressing aspect was that she appeared totally lost and confused a lot of the time. She was restless, unable to remain seated for more than a few moments, and spent a lot of time gazing out of the windows or standing in front of the wall calendar in the kitchen trying to work out what day of the week it was. Ken used the calendar as a way of keeping her in touch with appointments and engagements, and she would stare at it constantly, pointing to each day and asking about entries that had been written in. Every half-hour she would return to the calendar as though she was using it to cling desperately to keep a grip on the real world. Margaret’s short-term memory had faded to such an extent that if she answered the phone and took a message for Ken, she would forget who had called within two seconds of hanging up. As this failure made her very anxious I put a pen and paper next to the phone, and made sure it remained there; that way she could write the message down as it was being given to her. She also became obsessed with the family’s cats, Boris and Sheba, and followed their movements in and out of the house very closely. They enjoyed this attention, because she kept feeding them – filling their bowls ten or fifteen times a day because she simply couldn’t remember that she had already done so.
    My sister had also taken to hiding things and moving objects from one place to another. She was someone who had always been busy, on the go. Now she couldn’t think of any constructive way of filling her time so instead she relentlessly picked up any item that was left lying around and put it somewhere else. The cups from afternoon tea were put in the oven, slippers left lying in the family room were put in a drawer, and mail collected from the letterbox turned up in the freezer.Ken had to hide things that he really needed, such as car and house keys and incoming bills. It was all very frustrating.
    However, Margaret loved accompanying me on long walks, and these provided a great opportunity for us to talk about the past and discuss the different and yet similar paths that our separate lives had taken. Her memory of many of the events of her childhood had