The carer on my mother’s doorstep took one look at me and addressed me in a slow, patronising bellow.
‘Hello Mrs Kite!’ she yelled, as I answered the door. ‘And how are you feeling today?’
I informed this uniquely annoying woman – for all carers are annoying in their own distinct ways – that I was, in fact, the patient’s daughter.
She apologised but the universe had made its point. My hair was standing on end, I was still in my pyjamas at 9.30 a.m., I had chest pains.
In the dead of night, I had been woken by my mother standing over me with a pair of kitchen scissors.
In the dead of night, I had been woken by my mother standing over me with a pair of kitchen scissors
A few days earlier, she had fallen in her living room and broken her wrist. She was blue-lighted to hospital where they patched her up, but – with no short-term memory at all – she couldn’t learn why she was in plaster.
She cannot remember anything for three seconds. She has no sequential thought process at all, which makes her permanently distressed and unruly.
With two bad knees, she can only shuffle. But come the night time, she doesn’t need the stairlift. An otherworldly force possesses her, enabling her to move at speed, wreaking havoc.
We get no help from the GP, who only lectures me that I really must try harder to get chewable vitamin D down my mother, which is a bit like telling the crew of the Titanic to stop the lifeboat loading in order to measure up the deckchairs for new seat covers.
After her wrist break, my mother began waking up screaming in the night, and wandering about the house looking for scissors to get the plaster off.
I was getting my one or two hours of sleep on the sofa bed in the TV room, which is little more than a camp bed, and so uncomfortable it bruises my elbows when I lie on my side, and leaves me with lung pain when I lie on my back or front. In the dead of night, the door was flung open and she stood there in her nightie holding a huge pair of red kitchen scissors aloft.
In a broad Midlands accent, because she was now a child growing up on the mean streets of 1940s Coventry, she shouted: ‘Where’s me mam!’
My heart twanged like an elastic band, I clutched my chest, and I thought, I am going to die right here and now.
Those armchair critics who complain that arrangements made for the incapacitated don’t adequately safeguard the freedoms and wishes of the sick old person need to spend a night in my shoes.
‘Where is she?’ my mother screeched while waving the scissors at me. ‘Where’s me mam!’
The doctors won’t dispense tranquillisers, obviously. That would not be modern or compassionate. No. We don’t drug our old people now, you callous sod, they intimate.
She was so angry that for the first time I reconsidered my usual strategy which is to state that, as she is 85, her mother could not possibly be alive or she would be 120. She usually accepts this. But this time, with the scissors in her hand, and the look on her face, I decided to play it safe. I said we should get her back to bed.
‘Why won’t you tell me where me mam is!’ she wailed, in a voice that hasn’t come out of her since she was nine. ‘What have you done with her!’ What the armchair critics don’t understand, having never woken to a regressed loved one standing over them with a pair of kitchen scissors, is that there is no ideal scenario here. Once your relative has entered such an advanced phase of mental impairment, there is nothing good you can do. It’s all a terrible mess of bad and less bad options.
The arrangements you desperately fret over are compromises of compromises, pleasing no one, least of all the neighbours and the baleful public commentators who perpetuate the idea that old people are routinely being hidden away and abused by either care workers or their nearest and dearest. No one ever mentions what the demented are doing.
As the person coping with it, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Society hates you, because society cannot be honest enough to admit that what it is really appalled by is the screaming mad old person. ‘They can’t help it.’
Someone else has got to be blamed. Revulsion has to be expressed, and it cannot be of the person who has degenerated. So you’re it. You, the one who’s being threatened with kitchen scissors.
The next night I awoke to a noise above and went upstairs to find her in her bathroom with the sink overflowed, water everywhere, her pyjama arms soaked through where she had been trying to soak the plaster off.
She was wailing: ‘They’ll have to cut my arm off!’
The next day, I had to contend with her telling me she had got the cat stuck on her arm. The cat is white, so that should have been funny. Was it? I’ve no idea. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Please feel free to do either, for I have no preference.
I cannot sugarcoat this. During moments of calm, when I got her into bed, my mother lay like Kurtz with eyes wide, an expression of dread, murmuring about something it seemed only she could see, but which we might all, one day.
I wrote to her GP and then sat my father down and told him she needs to go into a care home. He told me I was cruel.
He has started telling the carers that everything is my fault. The way he invents things scares me because they take him seriously, even though he has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
As my mother slips into the abyss, I look up beds with locking sides, I beg the GP for sleeping pills, I remind the chirpy, moronic carers about feeding the cat, and I beg my father to tell me where the money is, before he loses his faculties.
All of which the armchair commentators would no doubt see as evidence of my being up to no good. But don’t worry, guardians of the old, my father is onto me.
I am legally cut adrift and can do nothing to improve their comfort as they go on this strange journey.
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