Softening at the Edges

I put the key in the lock and let myself into my Uncle John’s flat. A place I know well now. The ritual rarely changes. I make his breakfast, check he’s taken his medication, encourage fluids, and stealthily inspect the fridge for signs of life. Nothing unusual. Or so I think. Then I walk into the living room. And discover John ironing trains. Actual trains. Not train tickets. Not railway magazines. Not a shirt decorated with trains. Plastic toy trains. An entire basket of them sits beside the ironing board, waiting patiently for their turn beneath the iron. The smell hits me first. Burning plastic. Hot. Putrid. Deeply concerning. The sort of smell that confirms something has gone wrong and no one has intervened. The second shock is John himself. Because John is ironing. And honestly, I’m not sure which is more alarming. My Uncle John has spent an entire lifetime treating electrical appliances as though they are members of a hostile alien civilisation. I genuinely don’t think he has ever voluntarily used a microwave. Or a cooker. Or a washing machine. Anything with a plug has always been regarded with deep suspicion. The cordless Hoover is something he has never fully accepted as a concept. More than once we’ve rescued it from the wheelie bin. “It’s broken,” John would say. “No, John.” “It’s broken.” “It isn’t.” “Then why doesn’t it work when it’s plugged into the wall?” At that point, you realise you’re no longer having the same conversation. You’re just taking turns saying words. Technology has always happened around John rather than to him. Even before things changed, he lived as though modern civilisation was merely a rumour he’d heard from unreliable sources. I’ve walked in and found him washing his underpants in the sink. I’ve found him standing by the television, trying to turn it on by twiddling the aerial as though that’s how televisions work. Sometimes he simply stands there staring at his brick of a Nokia phone as though it’s an ancient artefact. Which, at this point, it essentially is. He carries it everywhere. A lifeline he can’t use. Still, it goes in the pocket every morning. Habit surviving where memory struggles. But ironing? Ironing is new. Poor Thomas the Tank Engine is currently fused to the underside of the iron. His once cheerful little face now bears the expression of a train who knows exactly where this track ends. That familiar smile has melted into an expression eerily reminiscent of The Scream. Those wide blue eyes seem to stare up at me. Pleading. Hopeful, even. Why didn’t you save me, Amanda? I look at John. “What are you doing?” He laughs. “What does it look like I’m doing?” The tone suggests the answer should be obvious. I glance at Thomas, who appears to have wandered into a significantly darker reboot, and is now regretting his career as a steam engine. “I don’t know, John.” He carefully peels the melted engine from the iron. A small plastic scream seems to echo through the room. Then he says: “I’m ironing my memories.” For a moment, the room seems to pause. “Oh.” It’s all I can think of. Just oh. Because my brain is still trying to process Thomas’s silently screaming face. John nods, satisfied that he’s explained everything. Which, in his mind, he has. Then he picks up Percy. Places him carefully on the ironing board. Smooths him flat. Runs the iron over him. Steam hisses. Plastic curls. Memory burns. I watch. And strangely… I let him. Because it seems important. Not the trains. The ritual. The care with which he does it. The absolute certainty that this matters. My Uncle John has Alzheimer’s. A sentence that lands differently every year. Heavier, somehow. The disease has brought with it all manner of heartbreaks, frustrations and small daily absurdities, but the truth is that John was never entirely operating from the same instruction manual as the rest of us to begin with. He has always been wonderfully eccentric. Wonderfully baffling, at times. Now Alzheimer’s has simply blurred the line between eccentricity and confusion until nobody is quite sure where one ends and the other begins. The thing about Alzheimer’s is that it doesn’t arrive dramatically. It doesn’t burst through the front door and announce itself. It slips in quietly. A thief with dainty toes. At first it takes things nobody worries about. Names. Dates. Where the keys are. Whether you’ve already made a cup of tea. Human mistakes. Perfectly ordinary things. The sort of lapses everybody laughs about. Until one day you realise the laughter has stopped. And the gaps have become canyons. Across the room, Percy loses a wheel. Thomas looks increasingly concerned about his future. James has begun to resemble modern art. John continues ironing. Methodically. Patiently. As though he is carrying out important maintenance. Perhaps he is. Perhaps that’s what struck me most about the dream. Not that he was destroying the trains. That wasn’t how it felt. It felt as though he was trying to save them. Pressing them flat. Fixing them in place. Holding them still. The way you might press flowers between the pages of a book. Trying to preserve something precious before it fades. As though, if he could smooth out the creases, nothing would ever be lost. John can still remember his way home. Which is a blessing. But there have been times he’s wandered too far. Times he’s become lost. Times the world has become larger than the map in his head. And that’s the cruel part, because Alzheimer’s doesn’t just steal memories. It steals futures. John was once fiercely independent. A little eccentric, certainly. But independent. He loved trains. Loved bicycles. Loved adventures. Nothing made him happier than throwing a bike onto a train and disappearing for the day. Exploring somewhere new. Following whichever route happened to catch his attention. No plan. No destination. Just movement. Freedom. The simple joy of being able to point yourself in a direction and go. The bicycles are gone now. Stored safely in Mum’s shed. Waiting. That’s the heartbreaking part. They’re waiting for a version of John that isn’t coming back. We tell ourselves they’re there until he’s safe enough to ride them again. But deep down we know. The bikes are retired. And so is the freedom they represented. Sometimes I think that’s what Alzheimer’s does best. Not the forgetting. The shrinking. The slow narrowing of a life. The adventures becoming walks. The walks becoming familiar routes. The routes becoming rooms. And, eventually, entire worlds fit inside four walls. John lives in his own world these days. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s devastating. Usually it’s both. At one point he became convinced the IRA had shot him in the back. Not jokingly. Actually shot him. “There,” he said, lifting his shirt. “Bullet holes.” I stared at a perfectly ordinary back. “There’s nothing there, John.” “They’ve healed.” The certainty in his voice made it impossible to argue. As far as John was concerned, the case was closed. That’s one of the cruellest things about Alzheimer’s. The confusion belongs to everyone else. To John, it often makes perfect sense. Another time he wandered around the close warning people not to sit on the grass. “It has been poisoned,” he informed them gravely. Poisoned. Like some suburban prophet delivering environmental warnings to an unsuspecting public. I imagine half the neighbours went indoors and checked their gardens, while the other half avoided the grass just in case. Then there’s the moving. Nothing stays still. A loaf of bread appears in the airing cupboard. The television remote turns up in the freezer. Cheese sits beside the kettle. A tin of baked beans migrates to the bathroom cabinet. Socks take up temporary residence inside the unused microwave. Nothing stays where it belongs. A stark reflection of the inner workings of a jumbled mind. Even getting dressed has become complicated. Three jumpers. Three pairs of trousers. Middle of a heatwave. John shuffling around looking prepared for a solo expedition across the Arctic. Meanwhile I’m sweating simply looking at him. The disease steals things unevenly. That’s what people don’t tell you. It doesn’t work logically. It doesn’t take the important memories first. Or the unimportant ones. It simply takes whatever it finds. Like a thief rummaging through drawers in the dark. Careful. Random. Thorough. Sometimes I visit and John gestures around the flat. “And this is where I live.” Not as a joke. As a genuine observation. As though he’s only just arrived. As though I haven’t been visiting this exact flat for the last eighteen months. As though we’re both tourists. For a while I used to prompt him. “Aaaa…” I’d say. He’d squint. Think. Fight his way through the fog. “…manda.” Eventually. Triumphantly. Like he’d unearthed buried treasure. I don’t do that anymore. Names have vanished like the days of the week. They no longer exist in John’s world. And honestly? That’s alright. Because recognition and love aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes he forgets my name. But he still smiles when I walk through the door. Still seems pleased that I’ve arrived. And maybe that’s enough. No. It is enough. Across the room the basket is almost empty now. Only Thomas remains. Poor Thomas. The first casualty. His melted face staring skyward. His features softened. His edges blurred. Familiar. Yet altered. John picks him up carefully. Almost tenderly. Then places him back onto the ironing board. The iron glides across him one final time. Steam rises. The room grows quiet. And suddenly I understand. Because Alzheimer’s isn’t always forgetting. Sometimes it’s remembering. Just not in the right shape anymore. Faces remain. But names disappear. Places remain. But directions vanish. Love remains. But the story attached to it slowly unravels. As though memory has stopped being a book and become loose pages instead. Perhaps that’s why the dream stays with me. Because beneath all the absurdity, there is something painfully true about it. John wasn’t destroying the trains. He was trying to preserve them. Flattening them. Pressing them. Holding them still before they slipped away. Trying desperately to keep their shape. Trying desperately to remember. I wake up shortly afterwards. The dream already dissolving. Dreams always do. And lying there in the darkness, I realise what stays with me isn’t the image of John ironing trains. It’s the sentence. That ridiculous, heartbreaking sentence. “I’m ironing my memories.” And it shouldn’t make sense. But it does. Because every time I visit, I see the same battle taking place. The memories becoming softer. The edges less distinct. The colours beginning to run. The faces harder to recognise. The names disappearing first. Then the days. Then the stories. And yet somehow, underneath all of it, John remains. Not entirely the John he was. Not entirely the John he is. But still there. Still laughing. Still carrying around a phone he can’t use. Still warning innocent neighbours about poisoned grass. Still finding inventive new storage locations for cheese. Still somehow, impossibly, John. The trains may be melting. The timetable may be gone. The stations may no longer have names. But somewhere inside that strange railway network of memories and misfires, missed connections and forgotten destinations, my uncle is still travelling. Still moving. Still heading somewhere. And every weekend, when I put my key in that lock and walk through the door, I find him waiting on whatever platform his mind has carried him to that day. Sometimes he knows who I am. Sometimes he doesn’t. But I sit down beside him anyway. Because memory isn’t the only thing that matters. Love, thankfully, has never needed directions.