I have been toying with the idea of posting about dementia for quite a while now. My mother is suffering from a mix of Alzheimers and Vascular Dementia and is getting steadily, and sometimes by dramatic plunges worse.
It’s hard to know where to start without trying to outline the kind of person my mother used to be – and therein lies the rub “used to be”.
Mum was a teacher for most of her adult life married my Dad after the war – I was an only child. She was at heart what most of us would refer to as ‘Old Labour’ politically – but she wasn’t political with a capital P – but was old enough to remember families less fortunate than hers before the war who could not afford the charges of doctors in the colliery village where she lived – and that has stayed with her all her life, a gently fuming sense of injustice against the insensitivity of the wealthy.
Anyhow she taught, I also think, out of a sense of ‘social duty’ – she thought the best way to build a fairer society was through education. Was she right? I guess that depends on who is directing the education.
My father died in 1983 – that is a staggering 33 years that Mum has gone on without him.
And what happens, she gets dementia at the age of 93 and the ties that bind her to the shore of reality grow ever more tenuous as she enters and ventures ever deeper into a chimerical existence.
And as I sit with her, as I do most days, listening to her telling me how she has met her childhood friend, Edith, who has been dead these last two years; or asking me about my lost twin – who never existed; I wonder to myself who played this cosmic joke, who made this possible – and then I remember nobody did. So I can’t even lay the blame anywhere for the guilt I feel.
The guilt I feel because I think I should be able to make this better somehow; to negate this awful, cruel disease – but I can’t. So I sit and I listen and I hold her hand in the hope that she can pull herself back to shore. All the while knowing that I and she can’t.
I leave feeling the premonition of the little death I will feel the next time I visit when Mum has drifted further out on that forlorn sea she is on.
