Aside from reports about Fake Fiona, crimes, and my life and death, the days at The Meadows had settled into a routine.  I still checked in early each morning, placing video calls every few minutes so that I could talk with him when he was awake but not yet out of the room.  David’s LBD was progressing steadily but not quickly.   He missed more often when he reached for food.  He found conversation harder – he found everything harder and more tiring.  He couldn’t get comfortable.  He accepted help more willingly. 

Early in the course of his illness, David was unsteady but rarely fell.  By 2021, I got occasional phone calls from nurses about falls.  He’d fallen on my porch, so I knew that he could appear completely stable on his feet and suddenly buckle.  The staff knew that, too, and they made sure he was in their sightlines all day.  At night, though, he would “self-transfer” from his bed to the bathroom and back again.  Pleas to use the call button were wastes of breath. Even when he wound up on the floor by the bed, he wouldn’t use the button clipped to the sheet.  He just pulled the pillow down and curled up and went back to sleep on the floor.

Aphasia made word-retrieval more difficult, but he managed some terrific work-arounds.  After the dismal holiday COVID in 2020, the word “Christmas” didn’t immediately come to mind, so he referred with a wry smile to “The Curse of 25 December.” “Easter” slipped away when he needed it, too, so he described something as “cottontail-appropriate.”  Fiona and I snorted.  He loved that. 

Aphasia was just as likely to frustrate and upset him, of course.  Sometimes he’d try two or three times to get the right word to come out, and he’d hear the difference between the word he had in mind and the word he spoke.  Often they were rhymes or near-rhymes.  Rable.  Thable.  Table.  Sometimes sentences would have everything except their nouns.  Were you able to get the?  I think it’s under the.  After the, I was very upset.  Sometimes sentences were pocked with holes: After the, I was.  He’d always been a mumbler, and now his voice was barely audible.  Ironically, I could hear him better than anyone else could because I could use the remote mic.  It didn’t help much. 

Out of nowhere, he’d suddenly speak clearly, in a way that was wholly and idiosyncratically David.  During a Zoom call with Fiona, he thought he heard someone outside the door of his room and looked concerned. 

“Is someone there?” he asked me. 

“I’ll go and check,” I said.  I opened the door.  Nobody was there.  “Nope, no one’s there.”

“Is that good or bad?” he asked me. 

“I don’t know, so let’s just say it’s good.”

David was silent for a beat.  Then he said, “But I always have to have my little bowl of regret and sorrow.”