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I used to look after someone with Alzheimer's and she used to sing this over and over and chuckle to herself until the words and she gradually faded away and there was no enough memory and wit to sustain the song or her any longer.

It just gradually erased her but when she could sing this....she sang her heart out as in defiance and had great fun doing so. She knew something was wrong and that something was funny but she didn't know what yet she did know...it was so frustrating for her and used to drive her to distraction. This little song was her way of fighting it back if only for a little while and at the time it worked.

A very cruel disease....takes that very human element memory and the ability to skip back and forward and across time inventing and reinventing ourselves because the person is not a static 'thing' but an ever changing....ever becoming fluid state of being. At the beginning it was a funny little way of fighting it then by the end it was sung with a manic desperation...words were always on the tip of her tongue but they were the wrong words...the almost words...the not-quite-alright words....the not-alright-words...the what-is-happening-to-me words. Before she was a highly articulate woman but now words were slipping away from her as she kept trying to lash them together to make a raft of sense to escape the Island of No Words which her consciousness had been shipwrecked on. The clock became the "time teller thingy" and so...on & so on.

*******

I used to look after someone with Alzheimer's and she used to sing this over and over and chuckle to herself until the words and she gradually faded away and there was no enough memory and wit to sustain the song or her any longer.

She called it her Al's Sigh more zong.