was in the kitchen when she heard him yell for her. Would she become his caretaker for the rest of her life?
No, Solome couldn’t handle a job at the Minnesota Historical Society, not even part-time. Not for a while.
For a moment, Solome wanted Stephen’s head on a platter.
That’s why Jesus had to die for her on the cross.
Stephen Savard
In the fall, when the yellow leaves were shining through my window, I made a doctor’s appointment.
Solome went with me.
“If Stephen has Alzheimer’s, it will take years for him to become incapacitated,” the doctor told us.
The conversation seemed to move too fast. If Stephen had the disease, the diagnosis was still inconclusive. He talked past me. I wanted to wave my hand in his face and tell him that Stephen was sitting before him.
We left town after the appointment, not saying much to each other in the car.
We drove to the cabin on Crane Lake, past Ely, Minnesota, and Buyck, near the Boundary Waters, just under the Canadian border. I woke in the night. I couldn’t remember where I was for a moment. I had to think. There was nothing solid to hold onto. There were chunks and pieces of memories of the day’s events. I had driven somewhere. I was struggling with my thoughts. I didn’t know what was happening. I had to fight an urge to bolt from the room and run as far as I could. There were crossed signals. Nothing was clear. There were parts of a road. Trees rushing past. A sky looking through the trees. A wedge of light. A fighting not to drown in the absence of thought. The lake! That was it. Was a mosquito humming? No. A dog barking?— No. We had left Brown in St. Paul. Mark would feed him.
It was as if consciousness was a briefcase I carried and had to pay attention to and not leave it behind. I constantly had to think until I knew what it was. Where were the keys to the car? What if we needed to leave? I had to remember again where I was and what I was there for.
That weekend, Solome and I painted a corner of the cabin ceiling to cover a watermark above the door. I thought of all the winter ice on the roof hanging into the rainspout, leaking into the cabin as it melted. It gave me something to do.
Maybe I had become like the moon that shined through the trees at the lake at night, full and whole only part of the time. Maybe I felt I was never in the same place often, yet somehow there was a return to the same places. Maybe that’s the way I felt.
I thought of the frozen lake in winter, compacted, cracked, one edge lifting on another, groaning at night with ice slabs sticking up, the winter spirit near. What if Alzheimer’s was like that?
The next morning, we pulled the motorboat from the water for the winter. Then we went out in the rowboat. The water did not cry. What were those thought that visited me? Where did they come from?
I had been a map maker, but it was a map of history. As I talked to Solome, I felt the currents of words. I could handle language. It was the water over which I rowed back toward the land. But the language I knew now started with something other and continued to change with words from other places, until it had become a new language of images, slippages and memories. My life felt like a card-table with collapsible legs. The legs were not locked in place. What if my illness would clip the table and it would fall, taking my life with it, and therefore Solome’s? There were wars and rumors of war. Economic instability in the stock market. Wildfires. Drought. Heat. Storms. How fragile life was.
As we closed the cabin for the winter, I heard the wind high in the trees, especially the old, tall tree by the cabin next door. I felt a chill in the air. A dampness. I told Solome I thought it could snow before we returned to St. Paul. But it was the coming storm inside me.
Solome Savard
Stephen was talking to someone. Solome could hear it, and he knew she heard it, and he covered what he was saying.
“There’s someone here. I can feel it.” She thought he said.
When Stephen could speak about his forgetfulness, and his feelings about his forgetfulness, which wasn’t often, he waited until they were at some event at the college, then said to Solome, “I know him— His name is hard to remember— He’s looking at me. I have to say something.”
But Solome didn’t always know all his college associates, especially the new ones. She couldn’t always help, though she tried as quickly as she could to learn the names. She had Jan send her a list of faculty and their photos.
“Just speak like you know him,” she would say.
But to speak would let the man know Stephen didn’t know him. “I have the feeling I’m only part here,” he said to Solome under his breath.
Solome waited for him to talk more about his forgetfulness. She looked at him in the car.
“My world is small each day I feel it smaller,” Stephen finally said.
She wondered if he knew he’d even said it.
Maybe some Alzheimer’s patients didn’t know what was happening to them. But Stephen would, Solome thought. Whatever was ahead, they would face it with dignity.
Stephen Savard
The history I had studied was rearranging its chronological order. To me, all the pictures in the house were crooked on the walls. I mentioned it to Solome, but she said they looked straight to her. The whole nation of myself was a history turned down like a radio.
I crossed swollen rivers, the wilderness, the buffalo herds, the Indians encampments. At last, I stood in the cul-de-sac, the houses circling like Conestogas.
Solome Savard
It snowed more that winter than it had in a long time. Solome heard the neighbors shoveling as she read the newspaper. She heard the yard man with his snow blower on their walk. She heard the snow plow late at night. Each morning, she called her mother and then Soos to see how they were doing. The snow took on a new meaning for Solome. It was the term, white out, she heard on the news. It described road conditions in a snow storm. Solome knew part of the world was being erased before Stephen too. How could she bring it back?
She was still awake one night when she heard Mark come in. She knew the familiar noise of his car. She thought she heard another voice. Probably a friend. Sometimes Mark tired of the noise in the dormitory at the college and came back to his room. They would want breakfast late in the morning.
There were great piles of snow in the street. Some of it they hauled off in trucks and dumped in the Mississippi River at night. Solome thought of the Christmas cards she had to send. The shopping she had to do. The party at the college to host. She had to send invitations to the smaller Christmas party they would have at their house for close colleagues and friends. She thought of the preparation she had to do for it. There was the Faculty Wives Club Christmas luncheon. The Historical Society luncheon. The party for her Discussion Group. A dinner at the house of the president of Cobson College. Other parties to which they were invited. Solome went over her shopping list again for gifts for the children and grandchild. Finally she slept.
The next morning, Stephen stood at the front window. He was leaving. Slowly leaving. He knew it, and so did she. Where was the language for that?
Stephen Savard
Solome and I sat with Soos and the baby, Susan, at the Christmas program. The church was filled with poinsettias and candles, the smell of fir and cedar. Soos hoped that Brian would meet us after work. She hoped he would attend church with her, or want Susan raised in church, or find help for their marriage. But Brian didn’t come. I watched the program with Solome and Soos. The children were shepherds, angels, Mary, Joseph, the animals. The sheep were in white dresses. One lamb had a cap with ears. One said, baa, and when everyone laughed, decided not to say it again. Caesar Augustus had decided to take a census. Joseph had to go to Bethlehem. Mary went with him. The children didn’t know what to do. They all had Alzheimer’s, I thought. One child was crying. Now his father was coming for him, picking him up, carrying him up the