BOOK REVIEW

It started with a small ad in the Guardian newspaper. A tiny ad for someone to care for an elderly lady with Alzheimer’s in Canada: “Live-in, full-board, two year work visa, suit student or single parent”. Londoner Carolyn Steele gets the job, and finds herself and her good-natured, nine-year-old son Ben living in Kitchener, Ontario with the delightful Zuscha, who has Alzheimer’s.

Meanwhile, Zuscha’s B.C.-based daughter is busy building a house identical to her mother’s on Saltspring Island, so that her mother will feel totally at home when she eventually moves across the country to be closer to her daughter.

Carolyn Steele’s book is an attempt at a humorous cross between travelogue (a Brit’s observations of Canada and Canadians) and diary (her daily experiences shepherding Zuscha). The book is based on a series of articles that Steele wrote for the British Mensa magazine.

Steele is at her best describing life with Dutch-born Zuscha, who is good humoured, good fun, devastatingly sarcastic, impossibly stubborn, deaf and diabetic with a sweet-tooth and a craving for cigarettes – now too dangerous an option.

Anyone who has lived with someone with dementia will admire Steele’s upbeat, accepting manner, and her natural instincts for linking Zuscha’s past with present idiosyncrasies.

Once a member of the Dutch resistance who hid people from the Nazis, Zuscha now spends hours peering from behind a curtain at neighbours’ comings and goings. A lifelong interest in archaeology becomes precious heaps of grimy pebbles left as a gift on young Ben’s bed. “In Zuscha’s world she is running her family home, we are guests and her husband will be home later…Reality is irrelevant. There are no calendars in our world and very few names.”

While it’s very jolly at first, with delightful outings and humorous anecdotes, Steele is honest enough to admit, “then, out of nowhere the big crisis hit”. She can’t bear the thought “of spending the foreseeable future yelling at a deaf old lady to PUT THE PAPER IN THE TOILET ten times a day, cooking meals that are forgotten the second they’re eaten, burbling about kebabs and doggies all day…” People rally, Carolyn and Ben have a break, and all is well.

That is, until Zuscha’s daughter sacks her mother’s keeper by email. The new house is ready; Carolyn Steele is apparently expensive as well as increasingly difficult, uncommunicative, irrational and stressed out. Steele readily admits her failings, but the tone turns decidedly bitter.

While there are almost another 100 pages of travels and temp jobs in Canada before the Steeles return to England, what is jarring is that there is never another mention of dear old Zuscha. After being introduced to such an engaging real-life character, the reader is left to wonder what became of this woman that Steele really seemed to love.

Personally, I wanted more of life with Zuscha that Steele captures so perfectly, and fewer wide-eyed descriptions of Ontario snowstorms and brawny Canadian carpenters. Mid-way, it began to feel as if I was reading A Year on Planet Carolyn.

Review provided by Kerry McPhedran – writer, caregiver for her mother before she passed away, and a volunteer with the Alzheimer Society of B.C.