When you are a normal person living in a normal society, you don’t realise just how much your life is governed by the spoken and written word, by signs and symbols and by numbers.  It must have been very hard for Bill to know that all these literacy and numeracy competencies, taken for granted most of his life, were fading from his brain.  Yet, in 2008, it seldom seemed to faze him and he just kept on keeping on with his life as if nothing was wrong.  As you have seen, however, there was plenty wrong.  Not only could he not measure, handle money, interpret maps or read and write, I discovered, as we journeyed through the year, that he could no longer read a calendar. This revelation came to me in the April, when we were planning the Camooweal trip.

“We could leave on Tuesday, 29^th of April,” I said  “And arrive at Matt’s on the Thursday afternoon.”

I showed him the calendar for the month of April. It looked like this:

APRIL   2008

I pointed to 29^th, when I thought we should set out.

“We can’t go then,” he said, tapping his finger on the number 29. “It’ll take us some days to get up there and that would mean that we would still be travelling here.” He indicated the blank square on the calendar beside the 30^th of April.

“It wouldn’t be good to be on the road then,” he continued.  “There’s nothing there. Everything would be closed. We couldn’t buy anything.”

……………

I was completely taken aback.  I went upstairs and lay on the bed, thinking.

When I came down, I was ready to best that beast that was confusing my beautiful husband’s mind. I took some old calendars, cut them up and glued numbers on the blank spaces. I explained that the calendar is divided into months for clarity and convenience, and that the days keep on going and people keep on working and living.  After half an hour of earnest tutoring, I truly believe that Bill understood, once again, that those blank spaces were actually 1^st, 2^nd and 3^rd of May.  Looking back with hindsight, however, I also believe that he did not retain the learning for very long.  I didn’t know it then, but I found, as time went on, that once a learning was lost, you could bring it back with teaching for a short time but it would be gone for good within a week. Once that part of the brain that governed the learning shut down, in my opinion, that learning was gone irrevocably.

In his book, The Brain that Changes Itself  (Scribe Publications, Australia, 2009), Norman Doige, M.D., describes how, with great effort and application, brain-damaged people can teach other parts of their brains to take on learning previously lost. Doige cites many examples, so I know that that is often the case. But that was never the case with Bill.  His brain, I think, was too old and possibly too damaged.