After a week in Coventry dealing with two parents with dementia, it would have felt like a nice spa break to go to Guantanamo Bay.
The smallest cell at Gitmo and a pair of sensory deprivation earmuffs would have been sheer bliss.
I got back from not picking up my father’s car from the garage and my mother was standing in the doorway crying.
In the time it had taken me to drive three times the distance to the MOT test centre in a circle of unfathomable six-lane 30mph Midlands bypasses, because that was the way my father wanted to go, the garage had shut and his car was locked up on the street outside.
I was rocking backwards and forwards slightly in the car seat making a humming sound as my father stood arguing with the closed shutters. If you’d put me in an orange jumpsuit I would not have looked amiss.
We had to leave his car there, and though I insisted on taking my own quicker route back, through the city centre, we were still away long enough for my mother to start panicking. She cannot remember what’s happening for even a few seconds so you could argue we should not have left her, but we couldn’t take her either because she would never have agreed on a coat.
I am more upset for the cat than for either me or my mother. I am a swirl of emotions, not all of them making sense
My father wanted his car MOT’d even though he should not be allowed to drive with worsening dementia. He swore all the way home from not picking it up as I weaved through the mean streets of Coventry, a city which aspires to become Islamic but can only dream of being as nice as Lahore.
The very fact my parents want to live there and not with us in a country house in Ireland is proof of loss of capacity. And then when we arrived at their house on one of those worryingly neat estates full of St George’s flags and the unsettling atmosphere of the brooding desperation of the white working class, my mother was standing in the doorway swearing at me some more for leaving her.
Because I’ve no power of attorney, I’m powerless to do anything but let the pair of them do what they want. Don’t put a coat on… drive your car… shout at me… call me names, whatever… I sat down for a rest and the news on my phone was all about the Bafta Tourette’s sufferer. He’s ill just like my parents. And his illness is being mishandled by the system just as theirs is.
Instead of conferring extra rights on those who aren’t quite in command of themselves, we should confer fewer rights. But society doesn’t say no any more, even when saying no is the kindest thing to do. On the basis that they can’t help it, the system argues that we need to let them do it, whatever it is.
I have lost count of the number of times I’ve pleaded with the GP to notify the DVLA of my parents’ dementia. But the GP says it’s up to them to do this, or me to take their car off them. The former is self-evidently ludicrous, while the latter misunderstands the strange dynamic between my father and me, whereby everything I say he denounces as absolutely wrong and, ironically, evidence that I have lost my mind.
As for the care system, even the private ones enter into the barminess. While I was there, the carer arrived and started talking to my father about his feelings and telling him about ‘the app’ whereby they can look up details of their care.
They don’t know what an app is. They can barely work a phone. As for my father’s feelings, he wants to run away to join the Ukrainian army.
‘They haven’t had any breakfast,’ I said coming into the room, and the carer looked daggers at me for being so mundane when she’d got esoteric concepts to blather about.
My parents go round and round in small circles like a Spirograph ever backwards unless someone intervenes.
The eating of a doughnut goes like this: some doughnuts sit on the side that I bought because my mother said she fancied them.
She looks at the packet and tries to undo it. She starts looking for a plate. The plate she gets out of the cupboard is clean but she starts to rewash it and dry it.
She decides the tea towel is dirty. She takes the tea towel to the washing machine. She pushes buttons and shouts about how the washing machine has broken again and should be sent back.
My father appears and starts arguing with her, bitterly. They scream and shout. The cat runs and hides. Have they fed the cat?
I feed the cat and begin fretting that I really should wrap it for entry to the EU and take it back with me. For some reason, I am more upset for the cat than for either me or my mother. I am a swirl of emotions, not all of them making sense.
It is now half an hour since my mother started to try to eat a doughnut. And the carer arrives in the middle of all this and starts discussing ‘the app’.
The GP says my mother is fine and my father is marvellous for his age. But that’s not true. They’ve got dementia. They’re demented. As soon as you realise someone has gone mad you’re actually able to handle it better. But no one wants to admit madness exists any more.
The state has medicalised madness and conferred on the mad more and more rights until the mad are being given more freedoms than the sane. Whatever my father tells the GP, be it truth or obvious fantasy, the GP writes the prescription for more pills that my father is demanding rather than saying the word ‘no’, because he wants to keep him happy.
Sometimes keeping someone happy is not the kindest thing to do.
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