Yesterday my mother passed away. She was 86. The last years of her life were stolen from her and her family by dementia. It was little things at first but they grew over time. Cutlery put away in the wrong drawers, groceries in the airing cupboard, the grill pan put away in the grill with the gas still on burning the handle. We disconnected the stove and added a microwave, meals were brought to her three times per day until the day the nurse found her collapsed on the floor. The meds that were keeping her mind mostly together were lowering her blood pressure so the mind meds had to stop. The descent from there was fairly rapid and over the next few weeks she mentally disappeared, and she had to go into full time care early in 2012.
The initial cause of her dementia was ascribed to concussions – CTE they call it today. It started way back with her having been run down by a car in the 1930s, followed by various slips and falls over the years. One fall, on an icy Swindon street, resulted in the instant loss of her sense of smell and taste. Part of her own joy disappeared with that, no longer able to smell the flowers in her garden or taste her food. I'd always felt she was a great cook but, unable to taste, she lost interest in it. She had been taught to cook by my father after they got married but it was she who taught me to cook, and to clean, and to sew and to do all those little domestic things.
As a young girl she had watched the spiraling contrails of dog fights overhead as the RAF defended England from the Luftwaffe. As a young woman she trained as a nurse and spent her Saturday afternoons sewing the ears back on to rugby players who had torn them off in the scrum. Then came marriage, children, and home-making. Divorce in the 1970s sent her back into nursing where she worked shifts including Christmas Day and New Years Day as those shifts paid triple-time. Divorce also forced her to learn how to drive and I (and my brother and sister) were in her car when she had her first accident, getting hit from behind while stopped in traffic on an icy road. We were OK but my brother's guitar, stowed in the boot, gained an extra hole that made it sound funny.
The years rolled by, she got promoted, my sister and brother moved out and then it was my turn. I don't know where my wanderlust came from – my father's side contains numerous sailors and my maternal grandfather had served in the British Army in WWI. He would never talk about it but my mother said his boat set off for france, took a right turn, and kept on till it reached India. He spent WWI fighting in Afghanistan. One hundred years ago, he was fighting in Afghanistan.
After college I entered the oil exploration industry and started my globe trotting. I'd come home, infrequently, often unannounced, but always to the warmest of welcomes. She was proud of her garden, small as it was – a postage stamp really – but something of immense pleasure to her. She'd always talk about how the season had been, what had bloomed and how well and what she was planning for the next season. And the books, she always had lots of books and read until her mind could no longer interpret the squiggles on the page. She tried typing and researching the family tree but the computer confounded her and she never got e-mail to work.
I think my moving to the States was very hard for her – I think she knew she would see me even less frequently. She participated in my marriage ceremony by conference call! Later, we flew her to the US. It was her first flight and, like a child, she was fascinated at being able to gaze down on the tops of the clouds floating beneath her. When we lived in Paris, visiting was a train-ride away. She'd never been before and she loved Notre Dame, Versailles, the Latin Quarter and the Marais.
We flew her back to the US for my son's first birthday and up to canada to visit with a friend from her london nursing days. Later we flew her back again for the birth of our daughter. She had a kind of innocence about her when she traveled and never failed to find helpful people to guide her through the international travel process. In 2001 we visited in November and knew that was a mistake the minute we stepped outside at Gatwick. Most years since then we visited England in early July but for me the visits were never long enough or frequent enough.
I always felt she lost a chunk of her identity when she retired from nursing – she lost her sense of purpose. Her friends were older than she was and over the years they too passed. She tried to substitute by helping clean the village church but she confided to me that she never felt she fit in. A carer all her life she never outwardly seemed distressed by all the death she had witnessed over the years and I'll never know how she came to terms with that. When she did talk about it, it was the mechanics of removing the body without the other patients noticing.
She wanted to be independent to the end, forever scarred by the experiences of her father in care as Alzheimers took over his final years. She asked me, and I promised her, she'd never go into a home but I knew that was a lie and I think she did too. And I was so far removed, thousands of miles away, unlike my brother and sister who lived down the street, who made the decision she needed full-time care, who emptied out the house of a lifetime of accumulated stuff. But they had less attachment to that house, as the youngest, I was the last to leave the nest and the one who flew the furthest. Parent's keep the weirdest things from their children's early years. Most of it went to the landfill, its purpose served since she no longer knew who we were.
Visiting her in the home was difficult for me. I took the photo above in July of 2013 a few minutes after the last flicker of her cognizance of my existence. She couldn't recall my name but for a second she recalled I was ‘the one who lived in America'. In the frames before and after she's not there but in this frame there's a hint of presence in her wistful glance out the window. I never saw her mind again after that day. Her body went on but her spirit had already departed.
I can't thank enough all the wonderful people who cared for her these last four years, a job I know I don't have the patience or temperament to do.
And to my Mum, I love you, I miss you. You truly were the best.
