easymess

[easymess]

"You're like a child again."

It’s winter 2017, and my grandfather already has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

For those who know someone who has or had it, you would know how cruel it is, and how unpredictable it can be in its different stages.

For Christmas 2017, my family and I go and visit my grandparents for a few days. We know he’s been suffering from it, my dad has told us how it’s started getting worse, but it’s hard to know until we get there. When he opens the door, I walk in, he says “hello sir” and shakes my hand. It’s the hardest, most brutal time I’ve been confronted with the disease yet. I have been told how it goes, how the disease evolves quickly, but I clearly haven’t seen this coming.

The lunches, dinners go by, and I realize how different everything already is, and it’s the 1st time I can really see what’s going on, the 1st time I can tell when he’s really here and when he’s absent, the 1st time I can tell when he switches off, when he comes in and out of the conversation, when he seems confused, when he looks scared.

My sister and I struggle the most with understanding it, we try and analyze the slightest change in his attitude to know how we can try to help. At one point during a conversation before dinner, he switches off the conversation, looks at my sister, as if he just clicked, as he just realized it was her sitting here, he stops and goes :”You know I love you”.

All the small events like that make me smile and suffer at the same time. Lots of weirdly cute moments stand out in the general confusion, as if the child in him had come out again. There’s him searching the house manically to find his biscuits, there’s him waving at himself in the elevator mirror, or him being inexplicably forward to women of his daytime care home.

My mum knows what it is, my sister and I are trying to adapt, and my dad has found a new strength to cope with it, repeat things, highlight the funny parts to protect anyone from how we could perceive this.

On the drive back to ours, some feelings are unexplained, some questions unanswered, and I can only try and loop the quirky bits in my head to convince myself it’s not that bad yet. I write the monster the week after, trying to get some things out, and build a piece that would be relatable, and maybe would ring true to people who have been in a similar situation.

Alzheimer’s is such a curious and cruel disease, like a monster that comes from within you, and mixes up the old and the kid version of yourself in an utterly confusing way. It changes really fast, it’s unpredictable, and it’s hard for people around, but we never really know what’s going on inside the head of the person suffering from it.

The Monster just passed 1000 streams on Spotify, and I wanted to thank everyone who listened, it feels good to be heard with this kind of song. For those who haven't yet, well now you know the story, but here is the song : https://open.spotify.com/album/14ygiEHe4e5I0Iw4PrFR42

[easymess]

A love song about not feeling able to write a love song. 

Sometimes everything is going ok. But it’s not what I write about, and felt petrified when I felt like writing a nice happy pretty song. So instead I wrote this tune, about not feeling in my comfort zone when everything’s going fine, and about how hard it can be to communicate good thoughts, when I’ve trained myself to exploit the bad stuff.

We performed “Not My Show”, I kid you not, in the Austrian Embassy in Knightsbridge, London.  Because that’s the kind of venues @sofarsoundsarchive offers.