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Reprinted from: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/01/nyregion/living-with-alzheimers.html?_r=0

FRAYING AT THE EDGES Part 6
By N. R. KLEINFIELD

SHE WAS FOLDED into a chair in the living room, working her way through a cup of coffee. She sat arched toward her husband, the two of them talking through the afternoon’s changing light.

The apartment was a pin-neat one-bedroom, its windows offering sweet views that went a long ways. The black leather couch and rug were new. Her idea. She didn’t want Mr. Taylor stuck replacing tattered trappings once she could no longer pitch in. Everything with her was do it now.

Ms. Taylor told him: “I find when you can’t remember something but you feel something about it, you take your mind out of it and let your feelings get to it. If you get frustrated and angry, that’s the worst thing because you have this emotional interference. At Memory Works, they said a couple of weeks ago if it sounds like something or feels like something, say it. I was trying to find a word and I thought it felt like hamster, and I said it.”

“Makes sense,” Mr. Taylor said.

It happened that her days spanned strings of triumphs and losses, the ratio vacillating. “I totally forgot the gutter man was coming to Connecticut,” she said. “I wrote it down. But I forget to keep looking. I arranged for a man to come to replace a broken window and I was out. He was supposed to be there in five minutes. I was 20 minutes away. Fortunately he was late.”

Their toaster ovens differed in their two homes. The Connecticut one had no timer to shut it off. She would leave things in it. Once a bagel caught fire. They bought a model with a timer.

“It’s not just the two being different from each other,” she said. “It’s each one being different every day. Operating a car, finding the buttons, gets me mixed up. I can’t figure out how to turn on the air-conditioner. I’ll put my coffee down and go to the bathroom and come out and make coffee all over again. And then wonder, Where’s my mug?”

Applying her makeup, she would overlook an ingredient — the lipstick, say, or the rouge. There is a sequence, she said. She had problems with sequences.

Sometimes during glum moments — when she fumbled a task or lost something — she got down on herself. She would tell her husband, “We need to see a movie.”

Mr. Taylor was always the voluminous talker in the marriage, Ms. Taylor much more abstinent when it came to small talk. Now she spoke to everyone and struck up conversations with strangers, a new aspect of her personality. “I think I just unconsciously started doing it, and the response has been good,” she said.

Her husband looked at her appraisingly and said: “The governor is gone. You’re always coming home and telling me about all these people you met at the photo shop or something.”

“I’m not indiscreet,” she said, eyes widened. “I haven’t brought home any cats.”

“No, but you’re less inhibited than you used to be,” he said. “You do what you want to do, you say what you want to say. You’re not concerned about hurting other people’s feelings.”

“Oh gosh, I haven’t done that, have I?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Oh good.”

Mr. Taylor said: “You know your days are finite. And you’ve found interacting with strangers much more pleasurable than you thought possible.”

All in all, they were feeling upbeat.

He said: “I know this sounds really strange, but I don’t think Geri and I have had a better period in our marriage than right now. We’re much more dedicated to be with each other. The disease has brought that. Yes, it’s short-lived and there’s a sadness to that, but we’re not focused on that.”

She said, “We feel fortunate in the misfortune of this time.”

Darkness had come on. The city glimmered outside. She untwined herself from the chair and trundled into the kitchen to retrieve a plaque she wanted to show. Months ago, she had been fishing around an arts and crafts store, when her eye fastened on it. It read, “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”

She had to have it. The disease had her wrestling with her self-identity as pieces of her disappeared. What kind of person was she if she couldn’t get names straight or make the oven work, forgot where she put that new blouse, forgot she even had a new blouse?

The plaque spoke to her, convincing her that she could build something else inside her, that she could unfasten herself from the past and not have it dominate the present. She said: “If you continue to think of who you were right up until the time you got Alzheimer’s, you will experience frustration, decline, failure, a lesser self. Not good company. I sometimes can’t complete a thought. I could feel bad about myself. If I have to measure up to what I was before I became this, I can’t. But if you let that go, then you are still becoming something. And it’s not necessarily a diminution of yourself. You must realize, it ain’t over.”

IF you have enjoyed these first 6 excerpts  from Fraying at the Edges, please read the entire piece at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/01/nyregion/living-with-alzheimers.html?_r=0