A Seasonal Sadness

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurological disorder in which the death of brain cells causes memory loss and cognitive decline.  Early-onset familial Alzheimer’s Disease can affect younger people between the ages of thirty and sixty years.  It accounts for under five percent of all Alzheimer’s cases.  New research has indicated that psychological stress is linked to higher brain levels of beta-amyloid, a protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease.

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I am now at the age when my mother, Barbara, first showed the early signs.  As winter miraculously merges into spring, I always feel it, that sharp sense of loss when I realised that her mind was slipping slowly away from her, from us.  The rich scent of jasmine and the burst of wisteria, the all enveloping hazy African sky, and the call of the laughing dove.  Was it in September when I first noticed it?  I think so.

Recently I met someone who mum had taught O Level French, decades ago. We talked about her unique and unforgettable character, and she remembered how mum would wipe the blackboard clean with her bare hands!   This struck a raw nerve and I felt her words rip right through my heart.

September 1991.  We were recently engaged, whilst sailing the length of Kariba in our twenty-one foot tub of a yacht, “Etude”.  Wedding preparations began soon afterwards.  Both my parents had just succumbed to a terrible bout of “yellow jaundice”, and had been bed-ridden for weeks.

The stark reality of the situation became clear to me at the second wedding planner’s meeting. We had been asked to bring recipes for the wedding menu.  As the head chef asked mum for her recipes for pecan pies and coffee ice-cream, she looked blankly at him, and mumbled incoherently, a wave of panic crossing her face.  A rush of adrenalin pulsed through my body as I realised that something was very wrong. This was the start of her sad decline.

My mother grew up in Streatham, London – hardly a salubrious area.  During the London bombings in the Second World War she was evacuated to North Yorkshire, while her parents stayed in London – her father was a bus driver.  I remember her telling me how she would go to bed, but would stay awake, waiting for her adopted family to go to sleep.  After that she would creep out of her bedroom, and tiptoe to the kitchen to find something to eat – anything, even a small piece of bread.  Night after night, she would carry out this strange routine.  She “had to,” she said, otherwise “something bad would happen to mum or dad in London.”

After the war, safely back in London, and enrolled in the local grammar school, she excelled academically, and was made head girl in her final year.  Despite her underprivileged background, she won a scholarship to St Anne’s College, Oxford, to read Modern Languages.

Barbara Helen Wilson met my father, Martin Malcolm Graham at a tennis club in Oxford.  The sixth child of an Anglican Bishop, he was reading English and in residence at Oriel College.  They fell in love and married immediately after graduation.  My father, having had a taste of Africa whilst fighting for the British Army in Kenya, persuaded his new wife to set sail for Southern Africa, where he had secured a job at Peterhouse School, Marandellas, in Rhodesia.  Here, their married life began, both as teachers in the middle of the African bush.

Mum was an only child, and leaving her parents behind in England resulted in her carrying an overwhelming and everlasting burden of guilt.  Four children later, suffering severe anaemia during her pregnancies, her mother dying of breast cancer, and living through the Rhodesian war, surely took its toll.  However, her brain was a colourful kaleidoscope of ideas, and her enthusiasm was infectious.  We understand now how hard it was for her, but somehow she managed to smile her way through many of the hard times.  Her engaging manner, lovely laugh and twinkling, brilliant blue eyes masked her increasing confusion.

Our world was one big adventure, especially in the holidays as we lurched from one near-disaster to the next.

We spent many holidays sailing in Mozambique on “Marmalade Cat”, our catamaran.  We were marooned on a sandbank once, and then nearly sank in the rough turquoise seas near Paradise Island.  Dad would brave the seas, no matter how ill-prepared we were.  With four children on board, these must have been terrifying ordeals for mum.

I remember crashing into a cow in the gloom of twilight on a journey home, and being thrown into the front of the car.   I think I was eight years old – how we laughed, oblivious to the danger and yet another near-death experience.

We left the country of our birth in 1977, at the height of the Rhodesian war.  The feeling of unease had crept in slowly but surely.  I remember listening to the news every night and hearing: “Security Forces regret to announce the deaths of…..” and the agonizing wait as they read out names.  Did we know them, were they friends’ sons, brothers, fathers?  I remember overhearing Mum telling Dad that she would never forgive herself if her only son died for the illegal racist regime.

I recall that last drive to Salisbury, and weeping copiously as my twin sister and I boarded the plane.  I picture arriving on the pale, grey, cold and unfamiliar land of my parents’ birth.  I asked “why are the houses so close together mum?”  I remember being dropped off at our new school, Ashcombe Comprehensive, and the slow, painful walk into the classroom, as the pupils whispered:  “look at their shoes, look at their shoes!”  Covered in make-up, and wearing high heels, the English girls sniggered.  We were naive little Rhodesian girls, in a foreign world.  “What do you live in, mud huts?” they would ask.  “Do you ride elephants to school?”  “Aren’t you scared of the tigers?”  Tigers?  I could not answer their silly questions.  We were miserable.

I understand my mother’s heartache now.  I picture my brother telling mum that he was going back to Rhodesia to fight the war – he couldn’t desert.  He would never forgive himself if he ran away while his friends were offering the ultimate sacrifice to their country.  He flew back, just weeks later.  At eighteen, one is an adult, right?  Free to make decisions which have really been made by the ultimate propaganda machine.

We followed Tim back, months later, just as we were adjusting to English life.  It was autumn, and surrounded by blackberry hedgerows, rolling fields of corn, and copper beech woods, we packed up again.  Our beloved Labrador Podger, finally out of quarantine, returned to Rhodesia with us, six months after his release.

Arriving home, we were smacked in the face by the searing heat, our eyes unaccustomed to the bleached, dry grass of an African spring.  We felt undiluted fear as we drove out to Wedza to see old friends.  Would there be a landmine on the road, would we be attacked?  They were out there, fighting for freedom, for the new Zimbabwe.  Tim was in the elite Rhodesian Light Infantry.  I remember him coming home in his camouflaged military uniform, how proud we were!  How brave my mother was.

Finally, Zimbabwean Independence was declared in 1980.  I have a clear memory of Prince Charles arriving for the ceremony, and Bob Marley singing “peace has come to Zimbabwe” to ecstatic roaring crowds in the packed stadium in Harare.  Tim was released from the army, and he would join my older sister in Cape Town, to start his engineering degree.

It’s difficult to believe that at my present age, mum was struggling to remember names and finish sentences.  Trying to find a name of a friend became frustrating:  “You remember so-and-so?” she would ask, “her cousin was the one who’s best friend, what’s her name, was the florist in that street – you know, the one by the ……?”

I wonder how she felt as she was transferred from her wheel chair into her bed – by then she was spoon fed, and unable to speak.  My father organised day and night nursing for her.  Did she know who we were?

I will never forget the day we moved my mother to the home, near to my sister’s farm which they lost five years later during the Mugabe-led land invasions.  Ten days after the move, mum died at the age of sixty-three, six years after she had shown the first signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

There was no history of Alzheimer’s disease in her family.

It’s September, my mother’s birth month.  I smell the jasmine – it’s a hazy spring day and the laughing doves are calling.  Clever, beautiful mum – was it the stress, the anxiety that caused her illness?

Yes, I think so.

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References:  Medical information on Alzheimer’s disease from:  Medical News Today (medicalnewstoday.com)