‘Do you know who I am?’ said the voice belonging to the lady who used to be my mother, crossly, at the end of the phone line.
The truthful answer is no. Since the dementia took hold, a hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body.
A hostile stranger who doesn’t think much of me inhabits my mother’s mind and body
No matter what I do, no matter how many times I ring or visit her, this person who used to be my mother is always cross and disappointed.
‘Oh, you’re alive are you!’ the strange voice barks, before asking me what I’m up to, with a sarcastic edge. Whatever I tell her I’m doing, even if I say I’m lying down with a headache, she snaps back: ‘That’s nice for you. You enjoy!’
This time, however, there was an added sharpness to her voice as she demanded: ‘Do you remember me? Hmm?’
‘Of course I do, Mum,’ I said. ‘We speak every day. We spoke yesterday. I’ll be with you this weekend.’ And I already knew that when I got there, it wouldn’t make her happy.
A week earlier, the builder boyfriend took the train from London to Coventry to visit my parents while he was in the UK. He looked at a fallen-down garden fence they were worrying about, had dinner with them and stayed overnight.
But she has no memory of this. In her mind, it is all neglect and abandonment, which is odd, because we’ve always been a close-knit family and there never has been any neglect by any one of us towards another, or any bad feeling.
Or has there? It worries me that some simmering resentment is behind the bitterness of tone and the unending disappointment she now involuntarily expresses.
Since my father lost his filters when he started out on his own ‘dementia journey’ –using the term ‘journey’ in the modern NHS parlance, for this is how they like to present all terrible illnesses now, as an exciting adventure – he has started to let slip things that I wish he would keep to himself.
For example, he calls me a bigot. He will readily denounce me as acting ‘like Donald Trump’ when I simply ask whether my mother’s carers have been that day. I’m a bigot and a bully and a right-wing conspiracy theorist, and I’ve also stolen a load of his jazz records. (I own the same ones, which confuses him.)
I have to take what he says with a pinch of salt because he’s also fond of declaring that he wants to fight the Russians, and he tasks me with finding out where and how he should apply.
When I was in their kitchen recently making dinner for them, I played along as best I could as he stood there demanding I get him a contact for the Ukrainians. Then I set down the frying pan and gently questioned whether his ambition to fight for Volodymyr Zelensky was really wise at his age, 89. I said I didn’t really want to help him join up, because, well, he might get killed in action.
He reacted with such fury, and denounced me so bitterly for being a Vladimir Putin apologist, that I decided it was better to say ‘Yes yes’ to everything he comes out with.
When my mother accused me of not knowing who she was, however, it felt like something had actually happened.
‘Mum, has anyone visited you today?’ I asked, on a hunch. And she revealed that their former cleaner had been round.
This woman I had to let go after she repeatedly didn’t turn up. Rather oddly, once she was told not to come any more, and a new cleaner was hired, she started saying that she wanted to visit them.
‘Why? What for?’ I asked. And she rambled on about wanting to stay in touch. Then a mutual friend told me the woman was going around telling anyone who would listen that she is ‘all they have’.
A few days after I found that out, my mother got short with me and told me this woman was ‘like a daughter to them’.
The BB laughed his best sardonic laugh when he heard that. ‘Oh I bet she is,’ he said.
Suddenly, it’s like I’m fighting a rearguard action. People are banging down their door to help them. Companies are in and out doing odd jobs. A new £200 Triton shower appeared with a bill for £900, and went wrong a few days after installation.
The worst ones are the charity ‘nurses’ who come for tea and sympathy and then seamlessly pull from their handbags ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ forms. I had to lodge official complaints to several organisations who tried that.
My father signed a couple of these forms, let the blasted charity lodge them with his GP, if you please, then later realised he had elected not to be revived when he didn’t mean that at all.
So yours truly had to undo all that, which was a job and a half, and just in time, because he then had a stroke, was treated and did recover.
I have to take what he says with a pinch of salt because he’s fond of declaring he wants to fight the Russians
My mother, meanwhile, had been donating to various animal charities she’d seen on the telly for some time when she turned round and told me: ‘Oh and they said that if ever I die they’ll take care of my cats for the rest of their life. All I need to do is sign a form…’
‘DON’T SIGN ANYTHING!’ I shrieked, knowing full well it would more than likely mean the blue juice for the poor cats.
‘For heaven’s sake, Mum,’ I said, ‘I don’t care if you want to leave the house to charity. But don’t sign your pets to those people. They probably keep them a week then declare that’s it, they’ve had the rest of their life. I mean, who is checking on them?’
She argued, so I said: ‘I got you those cats. I would come and get them and look after them like my own. Why would you ever doubt that?’
But my parents trust the state, the NHS, the myriad elderly and animal charities and the assorted new friends who are banging down their door with suspicious enthusiasm more than they trust me.
‘Do you know who I am?’ my mother asks, and the honest answer is no. But I know who she used to be, and that person would want me to protect her.
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