I am reading an interesting thriller by Rosamund Lupton, called Three Hours1 , during which a school is under siege by a couple of gunmen. Various people’s states of mind play out throughout the siege as they ruminate about their and other’s roles that may have contributed to this situation, while endeavouring to keep children safe. The young deputy headteacher considers the processes of his own thoughts under these stressful circumstances, as his mind is conflicted about what to focus on, whether on images recalled by listening on his mobile to another teacher’s poetry reading or on paying attention to the gunman’s steps in the corridor outside the headteacher’s office:
His thoughts are daisy-chaining, one to the next, to get away from the gunman in the corridor; mindfulness, which he’s been told to practise, is the opposite of daisy-chaining, and is about physically inhabiting the present moment, actually remarkably easy to do with a gunman outside your door; every hair on your arm, every breath, every sound and smell is magnified and it’s appealing, hateful, shocking, and he’d rather daisy-chain to Jacintha’s bank of wild thyme for a little while, for a reprieve…
And all this takes place inside his head in a second, his thoughts absurdly fast, not daisy chains but fibre optics, because that’s the other thing that happens when you’re in a building with a gunman, time changes, so that your inner self moves too quickly, an insect trapped in a jar, frantically battering wings against the glass.
This image struck me as a metaphor for the mind of people living with Alzheimer’s or similar diseases. I see faces trying to focus their mind on the busy, muted murmuring voices in the dining room of the care home I visit at breakfast time a couple of times a week. Their eyes dart all around the room trying to figure out who is saying what, while concentrating hard on coming up with an answer to the question ‘what would you like to eat this morning?’. Then, unable to figure out what is going on or what to say, the faces become blank and their eyes regain a distracted look as their minds revert to their own ‘daisy-chaining’.
I observed this phenomenon recently in Italy. My cousin Ginetta hosted a wonderful evening in our honour, her cousins visiting from England. Her mother, my zia Teresa, sat regally in a corner of the terrace from where she could see everybody and where her nephews and nieces and grandchildren could stop and chat with her as they moved around and mingled. I sat next to her and we reminisced in our own way, about moments we had shared in our life and the people we both knew well, such as her husband and my father, brothers who had been quite different in characters and life choices.
Aunt Teresa was able to hang on to a thought or an image for fractions of a second. Her disease is so advanced that the breaks in her ‘daisy-chaining’ are imperceptible and impossible to hold on to for any identifiable length of time. And yet they were there. I could almost touch them with my mind. ‘Ahh…’ she said …..’mio marito …’ …….. ‘si …..’ ma ….’
1 Published by Penguin Random House UK in 2020, it is available from Amazon