The Personals. Brian O’Connell
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Название: The Personals

Автор: Brian O’Connell

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Зарубежный юмор

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isbn: 9780008321352

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СКАЧАТЬ early and have parked outside a house in the west of Ireland. I’m sitting in my car waiting for the owner of the above rings to arrive home. Someone is knocking on my car window and wants to lead me into the house. As I follow, a large Alsatian appears and eyes me from inside the open front door. Just then a Land Rover pulls into the drive and a woman gets out, brushes past me and quickly closes the door before the Alsatian bolts. ‘Sorry about that,’ she says, before adding casually, ‘That dog bites.’ She half chides the man who let the dog out, before asking if I want tea or coffee and clearing a space at the kitchen table for us to sit.

      There’s a nervousness in the room and some tension. I don’t sense that it’s caused by me or my microphone. I think it’s more the fact that their space is now shared with someone else and they’re very conscious of that. As cups of coffee are served the man gets closer to me without saying anything, as if he is afraid to say the wrong thing. And then I notice the box on the windowsill behind the sink. Every day of the month has a little window and some are open, advent calendar like, while others are unopened. Inside are red and white pills, and the day and date is printed on each little portal.

      The man’s wife tells me that his dementia and diagnosis of Alzheimer’s has been a relatively recent discovery, or more accurately, that she didn’t know her husband had been diagnosed until recently. ‘I felt there was something going on,’ she says. ‘He was short-tempered and not totally focused on certain chores we would share. He wouldn’t do them, or he would forget where the keys were. Those things didn’t come in one day – it was over a period of a week. The biggest thing that made me go to the doctor with him was the fact that he wasn’t concerned about how he was dressed. He would forget things. More and more he would forget where keys were or that he put milk in the fridge without using it; silly little things really.’

      ‘He is changing into someone else,’ she says. ‘I could put my arms around him today and say, “I love you”. I could whisper in his ear that we had a great life and sometimes his response will be more measured. He might agree and say, “Remind me again how many years we are together?” But I could do the same thing later in the day, especially in bed, and he will push me away and say, “Stop that now, I have to sleep.” It’s hard to know how he will react sometimes.’

      Of course she worries about the future, and she worries too about how much longer she will be able to manage the situation. She’s done a lot of research into the condition and she believes that often it follows the personality and character of the person living with it. ‘In general terms, if the person is a quiet gentle partner and takes things in their stride and is easy-going, then often that is how it will be for them,’ she says. ‘My husband has always been active and forthright, like me, and he could lose his temper on certain things, so his illness is a manifestation of that.’

      She’s aware that he’s in the early stages of the illness. The medication available can slow it down, and while it does have an impact, she wishes she had known about her husband’s diagnosis sooner. Maybe he forgot to tell her, or a letter from his consultant might have been mislaid. Either way, she feels huge guilt for having arguments with him about forgetting certain things, when all along he had been given the dementia diagnosis and she didn’t know about it.

      As he tidied up she watched and tried not to make it obvious that she was overseeing what he was doing. We moved to the sitting room, where she produced a velvet pouch and began taking out rings. She was very deliberate in how she handled them, having taken them from an old shoebox which also contained several letters and some other items of jewellery. To my surprise, it turns out that the rings didn’t belong to her. ‘They’re my late mother’s rings,’ she says. ‘And she never wore them.’

      When she told me that they had been her mother’s and never worn, of course I thought of all sorts of heart-breaking reasons why. But she tells me that her mother had gone ahead with the marriage. In fact, it had been her second marriage. And the reason she hadn’t worn the rings was fairly simple – she had still been in love with her first husband. How had her second husband responded to that? ‘He respected it. You see, my parents loved each other very much, but they couldn’t СКАЧАТЬ