On 13 July 2021 I posted
I’m up and at it today!
I’ll head off to see Mum in the hospital again soon… she is almost blind, so can’t read any more. She can’t listen to the radio as it’s an open ward. So, while we’re not there all she has is the noise and bustling activity of the ward and her own jumbling thoughts.
The Escape Plan is coming along, but it needs to be a plan that will keep her safe and that is not as straightforward as it seems. Elderly people can be so frail, so fragile. So precious.
Anyway today you have the beginning of the fifth cosmos petal. And a sketch book so no other bonus pics today.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my relationship with Mum. And with her dementia.
Initially I was desperately sad, full of fear and terrified of what was to come. My biggest fears (have I written this already?) were that she would (i) no longer recognise me and (ii) have a dramatic personality change and become angry and SHOUTY. We have never been a shouty sort of family, and to this day I find myself recoiling if someone properly raises their voice at me.
To cut to the chase, so far, neither of those fears have come to pass, so I consider myself incredibly lucky .. of course I would be luckier if Mum did not need to live in a care home, if she could continue living independently at home as she wished; if she continued to have full use of all her faculties, as they say. But, given that she has dementia, I feel blessed that it has developed as it has. Watching the progression has been profoundly sad at times, but never despairing or frightening. I have never dreaded going to visit Mum, in fact I find myself yearning to be with her.
A few months ago, as Mum’s verbal communication diminished yet further, I sensed that she was struggling with taking phone calls. She often found it difficult to find the words she wanted to use, and could hardly understand what I was saying half the time. The calls seemed to make her more stressed instead of offering any comfort. Her hearing has been iffy for years, but she no longer wears a hearing aid. So I reduced my daily phone calls from every evening before she goes to bed to one or two calls a week, and generally through the day. I was weaning myself off the calls. I don’t know if Mum noticed when I stopped calling altogether, if she remembered that we used to speak on the phone every day, or if she had a sense of how long since she last saw or heard from me?
Anyway, I haven’t called her for so long now. And I miss her voice.
I wonder what she misses? She seems not to miss her easy use of language, her vocabulary, where she could always find the right words. Sometimes these days she can’t find a word, and it doesn’t seem to distress her – she just pauses and then the whole sentence seems to drift away.
She listens when I tell her what a talented artist she is, and that she drew the picture which hangs on her wall – but it’s as though I am telling her about someone she really has no personal interest in. She remains politely faux-curious about it, often responding “Did I really?” but she has no further curiosity about this aspect of her life, this person I am describing to her. Perhaps Past Mum really is someone that she has no personal interest in?
And occasionally I recount her story of when she was a 6 or 7 year old in South Africa… when she was sitting in the dust on one side of a barbed wire fence and drawing the mules which were grazing on the other side – I can still see my drawing in my minds’ eye, and feel the excitement of discovering how the legs joined onto the body.
Last time I told her of this story, she was vaguely interested in it, though she no longer remembered it. But she did acknowledge that if she told me then it must be true!
She did, however, remember that the ring I wear on my finger was her Granbunny’s ring, passed to Mum and then to me. And she remembered that her Great Aunt Janey had a very small gullet (cue: fake coughing from both of us, to demonstrate the smallness of the gullet) and that the same Great Aunt Janey had very large bosoms, and wore long strings of beads … and those strings of beads would, on occasion, slip into a bowl of soup and then swoosh back and forth across aforementioned very large bosoms, creating an arc of soup across Great Aunt Janey’s top. I feel I have known about Great Aunt Janey’s soup encrusted bosoms all my life.
And then, Mum will recall that Great Aunt Janey always said that Mum’s eyes were “green as gooseberries”. And Mum’s eyes light up, those tired gooseberry green eyes.
I can’t rely on these stories always having resonance, but while they do, they are like magic talismans to me. Talismans? Talismen? Why can’t we have taliswomen?
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If you want to catch up on how we got to this point, this series of posts starts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation. Or you could skip straight to the post when I first mention Mum recalling when she worked out how to draw a horse here. You’ll see some of her sketches of horses too.
Not in the mood for this? That’s ok. But if you feel like a bit of cooking or baking, or even making the best hot tomato chutney you will ever eat, then you could check out my recipes here.
Shewolfinthevalley 
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