MisoCat sat with me on the sofa as I stabbed yesterday evening.
She’s occasionally good company, when she’s not attempting to hack into my work laptop by pressing ALL the keys on the keyboard.
The bonus pics today are mum’s father, Commander James Graham. I met an elderly gentleman at a party the other week (I know! A party!).. and he discovered who I was, and then reminded me how much Grandpa liked to write to the papers. Most weeks there seemed to be a letter from Cdr James Graham in The Times.
One of my cousins asked who the elderly gentleman was, who recalled our grandfather… and I responded with what was actually the more interesting story:
He is a neighbour of Archie and Sarah McConnel. The first story he told me (when all he knew was that I’m from Gatehouse) was when he first started work as a trainee quantity surveyor.. he had a meeting in Fleet Street with Mr Wolffe. At the end of the meeting Mr Wolffe cracked open a bottle of champagne and invited him to join him… in toasting the birth of his latest child. That baby was me! His name is Robert Waugh.
The moment I tell Sarah that her neighbour toasted my birth, over half a century ago
***
Trying to care for Mum as she developed dementia nearly broke me on a number of occasions. Gentle meditative stitching the Fisherman’s Smock probably saved me, giving me a focus and forcing me to carve out time when I could let everything go and just concentrate on those tiny stitches. I would really appreciate it if you could make a donation towards Alzheimer Scotland. They’re doing stuff that makes living with this more bearable for so many people. Thank you, thank you, a thousand thank yous.
And if you want to read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia, then you could start here at Taking smock of the Situation. Or just dip in. After all, if I’ve learned anything this last couple of years it’s that chronology and time are less important than we might believe.
I’m nearly at swallow time again, just as the wee darlings prepare to set off for the Southern Hemisphere again.
I didn’t speak to Mum today. I’ve thought long and hard about it, but I have decided that daily contact probably won’t benefit either of us. I don’t really know if it would be good for mum or not, if I knew it was a comfort to her I would do it in a flash. I know that within minutes she has no recollection of my call.
And phone calls with her are generally less positive than visits. And I honestly can’t do them every day. OK I could. But I choose not to.
I know she is well cared for. This used not to be enough, I wanted her also to have some pleasure in her life.. she had a remarkable ability to still find pleasure in her diminishing world, as she became less mobile and increasingly blind. We picked her flowers so she could smell them. We cooked tasty meals packed full of flavours to stimulate her taste buds. I hold on to that moment she smelled the honeysuckle early this summer. She seems unable to find that joy any more.
So. Go out. Smell the flowers. Sow seeds. Grow plants. Feed the birds. Soak up nature. Swim in the sea. Climb trees. Eat plums as you pick them from the tree. Eat whatever takes your fancy. Enjoy every moment while you know how to.
It both breaks my heart and brings me solace to re-visit this post in my memory. Solace, remembering all the joy Mum eked out of her world, and shared with all of us around her. Sadness to recall how distressed and confused Mum could be on a phone call. I continued to call her several times a week, until one day, many months later, I decided not to any more. As much as anything, I needed to wean myself off that regular check in with her once it was no longer nourishing either of us.
But today I urge you all to take every ounce of joy that you can from each hour of each day. I am reminded of the night before I left home to go to University, in London, leaving home for the first time, and at the age of only just 18. I went to say goodbye to my Gran… we chatted and she talked of this and that, I remember not what… and then she paused and looked at me with those pale blue eyes of hers.
As she was holding my eye contact, she said: “Loïs, don’t do anything you’ll regret.”
I gulped. This seemed like an important instruction from Gran, whom I was named after, and adored (but also I did not want to disappoint her in any way). She was my premier matriarch in this matriarchal family.
She continued, “But remember that the only things you regret in life are the opportunities you missed. If it makes you happy(and you’re not hurting anyone else) do it”
Gran was so right.
As you travel through this world, enthusiastically embrace every opportunity and follow your heart.
A young(ish) Gran in a fabulous embroidered cloakMe with Gran, circa 1967
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
I visited Mum again this morning. And took her more homemade biscuits. She really does love her biscuits.
I told her (again) that her big sister has moved into a home. Mum seemed to have a flicker of understanding and then told me (again) that she didn’t think she would do that.
Mum had her 90th birthday earlier this year. We were still in lockdown and my brother was with her. No-one else, as we weren’t allowed more people from different households indoors at home. It really was not the greatest way to celebrate all those years. Three weeks later she was diagnosed with mixed dementia. I was surprised and yet not at all surprised by the diagnosis… I pretty much knew she had the early stages of dementia so it was a relief to have it confirmed. But the assessment was done over the phone and as I sat next to mum listening to the call, I felt she was doing so well and worried there might be no diagnosis. But at the end of the call the Dr told mum his diagnosis. The phone was passed to me and he confirmed to me mixed dementia: Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia.
I hadn’t expected this immediate diagnosis, but knew that I was not now going back to my ‘office’ and working straight away. Instead I reassured mum that dementia was just a word, she was still my same mum and I loved her and would keep her safe.
The next morning mum acknowledged she had a touch of the alzheimer’s.. and then seemed to forget about it. Occasionally now I remind her. But mostly I remind her that she is loved, that she is the best mum.
Your bonus today is the River Fleet, and this view feels as familiar to me as the back of my hand so I’m grateful I get to walk across the bridge and see the peaty brown water each time I go to visit mum.
I took a picture of Mum as she was sitting quietly in the sunshine the day before she was diagnosed. Two days after her diagnosis, she was again sitting in the sunshine, and I took another picture of her. These two pictures feel so different to me. In the first she seems carefree, and in the second, there is such a sadness in her far away look. She looks so lost.
And she was, she was beginning to be lost. To everyone, even herself.
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
Same with Mum really. An optician came to the home on Friday and I accompanied Mum to her appointment.
It was just a week since I’d seen her.. and when the carer told her I was there she didn’t think they were telling her the truth (this is a recurring theme). When she saw me she kept asking if really I was Loïs, she didn’t believe it was really me. This was not expressed with any joy, just sorrow that perhaps it was all a con.
The appointment with the optician was hard for me – mum was distressed and tearful and wouldn’t let go of my hands. But shortly afterwards she had forgotten it all. She was still mistrusting and unhappy but pleased that I would come back the next day with biscuits.
I did. And she was much less distraught… I sat and crocheted as we chatted. I’ll drop in and see her this morning before heading back up the road.. I don’t know if she gets much lasting comfort from my visits (other than the full biscuit tin) but I sense she gets some little comfort while I am there.
As I re-read this post I feel that ‘slow progress’ is one of the recurring themes of the last two and a half years.
In ‘Today’ Mary Oliver writes this line:
I hardly move though really I am travelling a terrific distance
And although none of us has moved much in the last two and a half years, we have all travelled such great distances. And this last month Mum has moved less than ever, mostly sleeping, occasionally waking and smiling. But she is surely travelling a terrific distance, and soon will travel to a place unknown. Her slow pace has helped us to adjust to this new destination. She travels with such grace.
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
More clothes pegs on a line. They maybe don’t look much like clothes pegs but they are, and I kinda like them. They might make more sense once the swallows are there too.
The bonus picture today is of the Duncan siblings, taken on the steps of Newlands during WW2. They all feature in Mum’s memoirs in different ways, but the biggest character is Newlands itself.. it was given to Norwegians during the war, to use as a hospital, while Gran lived in the Garden Cottage with her daughters, Jen and Mum. But more on that another day.
The Duncan siblings: Arthur, Loïs (my Grandmother), Walter, Lorna and JohnNewlands as a hospital, during the war
Mum was proud of her connections to Norway, first developed on her long journey back to Scotland at the start of WW11. On the ship were only a few passengers, and it seems that they were mostly Norwegian whalers, heading back to Europe to fight. Our Grandmother had a particular and long-lasting friendship with one, Kris Thoresen also known as Big Dog.
And Mum remembered with great fondness the young recuperating Norwegian soldiers who climbed trees with her on the Newlands Estate during the war. When she jumped into a large water tank and cut her foot (almost in half by all accounts!) on a broken jam jar at the bottom of the tank, she was carried up to the Big House which the Norwegians had turned into a hospital during the War, and there the kind Norwegian surgeons sewed her foot back together and the nurses bandaged it up.
In 2017 Mum contributed to a local project, gathering information about the connections between Dumfries and Norway from WW11 and beyond. The project is now all compiled here: Our Norwegian Story. There is oodles of information on the site about the many and varied ways that the Norwegians and the Doonhamers engaged with one another, including a section on Newlands (click through on the locations, and then on Newlands).
There were Royal visits to Newlands, by King Haakon in the 1940s and then King Olav in the 60s. As Mum’s mind started unravelling she became slightly obsessed with King Haakon, and with the plaque he unveiled at Newlands – she would suggest that we went for a visit to see the plaque, because no-one else would know about it any more, only her. There were days I would visit and she would tell me that he was coming to tea the next day, or that he had been there earlier, and now had thrown all his rubbish into that pile ‘there’ (pointing at the corner of the bed, where she regularly claimed there was a rubbish dump).
One of Mum’s other obsessions (for a while) was biscuits. She LOVED to have biscuits in her tin. And as fast as I could bake, and fill up that tin, they would all be eaten again.
And then I found a recipe for King Haakon biscuits! The joy! Of course I made a batch and took them to Mum, who declared that they had probably been made specially by the cook at Newlands, and that cook got the recipe from the King. I took that as praise indeed for my biscuits.
The biscuit recipe actually came from the WI Biscuit book, which is an absolute must for anyone who vaguely likes making biscuits.
And now I have a batch of the biscuit dough in the fridge, ready to be cut into slices and baked, so soon the kitchen will smell deliciously of sweet baking.
Do let me know if you make King Haakon biscuits. Or if you want the recipe for the Cardamom Cookies, which are sensationally good. One of these days I’ll get back to writing up more recipes again.
***
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
This morning I awoke wondering about the timeline of this writing. It feels as though I am writing in several different timezones all at once:
the time when I originally posted the picture (currently August 2021)
sometimes decades earlier, reflecting on aspects of Mum’s life
and now.
Though really, I haven’t been saying much about now have I?
And I wonder if that is what is going on? Am I writing about what was happening 19 months ago, in order to hold back time? Or too avoid looking too closely at what is going on right now? Because A Lot is going on. And has been (in various forms) for quite some time now. Perhaps for all those 19 months.
More recently, over Christmas it became clear that we were getting rapidly to the point when we would need to sell her house to release the equity to cover the eye-watering weekly fees for her ongoing care. On another occasion I will write more about this, for now all you need to know is that we made the decision to put our home on the market, so we could buy Mum’s house (if the figures added up and we would be able to do so).
The figures do and so we’ve been making progress. But rather like the washing line of swallows 19 months ago, it has been slow and steady.
And then in early March things changed. Mum’s health deteriorated significantly, and she stopped eating. A few days later she started to eat tiny amounts again, but most of her time is spent sleeping and it feels like she won’t be with us for much longer. If she had not started taking in some food again, we were told she may only have 2 or 3 weeks left with us.
So the anticipatory grief rollercoaster throws us around another loop. After spending several days sitting with her each afternoon as she slept, and I worked, or wrote, or knitted … and several evenings talking with my brother, we both felt that it was time for us to come back to our homes again. Mum is calm and peaceful; she is serene and when she wakes and sees that we are there she gives us the biggest smile. Her hair has been stroked more than ever before in her life, her hands smell sweetly of the lavender hand cream we rub into them. She smiles with delight when the carers come and care for her.
The first few days of this new normal were unbearable. Life without Mum has always felt impossible. But we know it’s not impossible. We just haven’t experienced it yet. We will learn how to live with it, like we learned so many other things, And in a strange way, it feels as though Mum is, yet again, showing us how to get through this transition – with grace and love.
***
You can read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia starting here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started when I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
See these lovely wee girls with their whole amazing lives ahead of them?
They are my mum and her big sister, Jennifer.
Most of their lives are behind them now, but they are still full of so much love.
Jennifer has chosen to move into a care home this week and I send all my love to her and her family as she settles in to this new environment.
In recent months Mum has talked a lot about her early childhood when it was just her and Jennifer. They were a wee team, never apart. And although they are physically very much part these days, with Jen in Ireland and Mum in Scotland… somehow it isn’t surprising that they both go into homes within weeks of one another. Still doing things together, as they always did.
And here we are 19 months later and they are both still in care homes, being cared for with utmost professionalism and kindness.
But they are so very different. Mum has advanced dementia, and even communication is becoming more difficult for her these days. When I visit her she will generally sleep for most of the time, so I always remember to take my knitting or some writing so I can sit quietly beside her as she sleeps.
My brother and I visited Jen at the end of last month and she continues to be sharp and challenging, and bright, and interested in everyone and everything. It was an absolute joy to spend some time with her.
As a bonus, I share some more pictures of Jan and Alix from the early 1930s, coloured using palette.fm
***
You can read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia starting here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
This is the beginning of a washing line with a bright plastic clothes peg. After the big pink cosmos flower this feels so small and delicate. And fun.
You have two other bits of embroidery in your bonus pics today… the first is some embroidery I did when I was about 12 years old (when my eyesight was considerably better) for my grandmother who I was named after. It’s the corner of a wee cotton hankie… one of around 100 hankies I found in mum’s chest of drawers. The 2nd is a monogrammed towel, which must have been a wedding present for my grandparents, making it over 100 years old.
The gift of sight is a thing you don’t appreciate until it starts diminishing.
When we were young, one of the closest of our aged relatives was our Uncle Walter. And he was blind. But I never quite understood the impact of him losing his sight because he seemed to manage to get about ok, and was a much-loved uncle who told the best stories and was the life and soul of any room he was in.
Though there was the fabled story of when he had walked through the plate glass door from the kitchen to the wash house, without opening the door. He hadn’t seen that it was shut. And glass. And he had just kept walking. If he had stopped on impact, it was believed a shard of glass might have come down on the back of his neck and killed him. Hurrah for keeping going when things go wrong!
I realise I don’t know why he was blind, what had happened to his sight? In my childlike way, I just assumed it was something that happened to some old people so I never enquired.
Mum’s eyes have been a trouble to her for years. Some 20 or 30 years ago she suffered from Bell’s Palsy, where one side of the face is weakened, apparently paralysed. Her mouth drooped on that side, and she was unable to close her eye. Mum was given some drugs, and eyedrops and lubricants, and a patch to put over her eye. I think it was taped up at night for a wee while too. Then the doctors took the decision to sew her eyelid shut until the palsy disappeared, to protect the eye.
When they cut her eyelid open again, they cut in just the wrong place – and forever more Mum’s eyelashes on her right eye grew inwards, scratching her eyeball, instead of outwards, protecting it. She would attend the eye clinic a the hospital in Dumfries every 6 weeks for what she called her ‘eye torture’.
Having escorted Mum to the eye clinic at hospital on many occasions, I appreciate having my eyesight, and also not having scratchy painful eyeballs. Poor Mum, she never ever complained about it, but it must have been horrid.
***
You can read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia starting here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
First stabs at the new design and I have already stitched and ripped it out twice. I didn’t like how the stitches were sitting, which might be because I really need to get new glasses and better lighting so I can see more clearly what I’m doing.
I was at Mum’s at the weekend and noticed that the second brood of swallow babies had fledged.. they were sitting resting on the washing line… and are today’s bonus pic.
I’d harvested mum’s potatoes the weekend before and when I told her, she’d looked all wistful and regretted that she wouldn’t get to eat them. So I decided she could, which meant I was scrubbing new potatoes and boiling them while I had breakfast on Sunday morning. Then I stuffed them in a wide mouthed thermos flask and smothered them with butter and salt and pepper.
And after our coffee mum had a potato course, before her lunch arrived. She loved them. It was so good to see her enjoying the moment.
It’s all about the moments these days.
Did I ever mention that mum taught me how to fly? She honestly did. As a child I believed I could fly, if I really wanted to. Mum gave me that belief in myself.
I told mum about the fledgling swallows and she was wistful about them flying off to South Africa. I reminded her that we can fly and she smiled, remembering that yes we can fly. If we want to.
The beginnings of a new design… the ‘Can I do this?’ anxiety is realMy colour palette for the next designThe swallows have fledged. Soon they will fly all the way to South Africa
Reading those words some 18 months after I first wrote them I am struck by two things:
It continues to be all about the moments
Mum, despite her own apparent incapacity, still gives us the confidence to fly in whatever way we need to
Mum spends more and more time sleeping these days. She seems so calm and serene and at peace with her world. Again, I am astonished at how she continues to demonstrate her superpower of adapting to whatever circumstances she finds herself in.
When I visited her on Friday I sat beside her as she snoozed. As she woke up, I stood up and opened my arms as if to hug her, and said “hello Mama”… I was about to follow it with “It’s me, Loïs!” when she smiled a big smile and started to say ‘hello….’ and then she paused as though thinking what came next, but instead of worrying about it or thinking any further, she just repeated what I had said, “hello …. Mama!” There was such joy in that moment.
It’s all about the moments.
In some ways we are getting ready for her to fly, to fly away forever. I’m not sure I will ever be ready for that moment… though I do feel confident that she will when it comes.
***
You can read more about my relationship with Mum and her dementia starting here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Way back in January when I found the smock and decided to embroider it Mum came up with the idea of swallows swooping over the back yoke; and across the front I embroider them sitting on the washing line.
The parent swallows do this under the car port as they take a breath before feeding their babies. And when the wee ones fledge, they first sit on the washing line before taking their first flight.
Mum never drafted the design for me, she’d given up drawing. We now realise that she was already coping with dementia and I guess her brain could no longer put the images on paper in a way that would satisfy her. The design was created by my nephew, Max, when he was last visiting and the swallows were feeding their babies.
Your bonuses today are the Graham sisters. Mum is one of four sisters. We don’t have many pictures of them all together either as children or adults, so it was lovely to find these two.
Mum’s painting from the 100 Days Project 2020Mum’s painting from the 100 Days Project 2020
I’ve struggled writing much recently, in fact I’ve struggled doing much of anything of any real value recently, which I think is ok. Though only ok for a short while – but it’s been a long winter, and perhaps Spring will do its magic and perk me up a bit?
I know that I’ve been experiencing anticipatory grief for more than two years now, and while most of the time it is now cope-able with, there are times when it is overwhelming. But that is the nature of grief. And grief is a response to love. And I will always be grateful for that fierce (though mostly unspoken) love.
When Dad died, it was relatively sudden – he had a serious stroke and a week later died in hospital. So we’d had a bit of time to prepare ourselves for his death, and when it came it really did feel like a relief, as the alternative (him making a slow and partial recovery) felt considerably worse. And although his death broke me for a while, I knew that the worst had happened, that in time I would find a way to sit more comfortably with his loss, and also with his life.
Over the last two years, as Mum’s health has deteriorated with dementia, I have come and gone in her life. We live 100 miles apart, and once she was settled in a care home I returned home, visiting her initially for a week each month and then every couple of weeks, for a couple of days at a time. And each time I saw her it felt like a bit more of her had gone while I was away.
And still I knew that there was more to lose. That’s the thing about anticipatory grief – however bereft you feel each time, however much that grief weighs you down, you know that there’s The Big One coming, that dreaded day when you won’t be able to see her smile, won’t hear her say your name (or any name) again. So you focus on the relationship you have, on who Mum is each day, and you celebrate the rare giggles, the random responses to questions, the delight she seems to have when she sees who has come to visit her.
Mum hardly engaged with me at all over the weekend, but when I left on Saturday she pursed her lips and blew me a wee kiss, a memory of bigger kisses she has blown me in the past.
I started writing this series of posts here, with Taking Smock of the Situation, an embroidery project I started after I realised Mum might have dementia. There I was, embroidering her old fisherman’s smock with symbols relating to her life; while her memories were slipping away, like me at a party I don’t want to be at.
Before that I blogged about whatever I was cooking and you can find my recipes here.
Shewolfinthevalley 