I thought I was prepared for what I would find when I came down to look after my parents a month ago, but I was not.
Until five months ago Mum was still swimming most days. But then almost overnight everything changed. Polymyalgia and a deteriorating hip caught up with her and she cannot now move a single step without a walker.
Dad walks okay for 97 but is soon short of breath and vulnerable to fainting if he's upright too long.
He reads the paper all morning, will ask you a question about the story he’s reading — how does vaping differ from smoking; what constitutes a vexatious litigant — and if a scammer rings and you gesture to Mum to hand you the phone so that you can loudly unload on them that it’s despicable to be preying on old people and they are fucking scumbags he will laugh with delight.
But also he will ask you a question you just answered two minutes ago, and ask it again in another two minutes, and many more times. And to make it a bit more difficult, his hearing has been absolutely ruined by a lifetime of loud equipment and he can't be doing with hearing aids and because of Covid I have been masked the whole time and so there’s been a lot to discourage sustained conversation with him.
Until she could no longer move, Mum had been picking up, if you will, the slack and it was wearing her down. This past month crystallised things. I would do all the things she would otherwise have been doing to get them through the day. She said if this was what rest care was like, she was so very much ready for it.
And we all agreed - my brother, my sister, Mum and me - that it was time to find them a place if we could and we also agreed - my brother, my sister, Mum and me - that this was all very well apart from the bit where we tell Dad, who has said he'd rather die than end up in one of those places. And how far would the conversation get anyway, with so much falling out of memory so soon?
Mum resolved, once we’d found a place, to try anyway. For the sake of not making this a very long story I'll just say: the first place I visited proved to be the best and others I saw crushed my spirit. So we rushed to get this one arranged and I took Mum to look and she was thrilled. All of this has happened inside the past ten days; including the explaining of it to Dad.
Some conversations went better than others. The one that seemed to resonate best was I have to go into care and you can come too.
There would be encouraging moments where spontaneously he would ask Mum, When are we going to our new place? But then a moment later you would be deflated when he would say, How about you go, and I stay here?
And when you hear him telling her after a pause, I was hoping I would die here, the guilt comes down upon you because even though it is clearly for the best, it also feels like a betrayal.
But I'm also frustrated because he's entirely unaware that he's inevitably falling in the shower and needing help that Mum can't give him and he was out cold for about quarter of an hour one time last month and two ambulance crews came to carry him away to hospital and he remembers none of it.
They say about cats that they are never without their dignity and that's been the same for Dad, really, which is maybe why he needs that shower to happen on his own terms. However, Mum keeps trying to explain to him, it causes nothing but upset for everyone else. The bathroom they’ll be going to will have much more shower room, and staff will be on call to help should he need them, and this is where they are now, like it or not.
We were looking forward to Tuesday. We were dreading it. Everything felt uncertain, fragile, tentative.
What if he should point blank refuse? What if he’s devastated by the whole thing?
And then Tuesday was here and roofing iron was being unscrewed and hurled off the roof in every direction by half a dozen highly capable and energetic guys and I swear the Normandy landings would have been quieter.
What a time to be happening eh? Except, we soon came to see that it was providing valuable distracting confusion, enabling us to quietly start moving things out to the trailer, get around to the rest home, hang pictures, put flowers in vases, lay out as many treasured memories and little pieces as possible and also try to get the TV and the Sky and the phone and the Internet working, quick as we can.
And now Mum’s saying Now, I think and telling Dad they need to get some things together in the manner you would for going on holiday. And then they’re done and we’re helping Mum down the steps and into her chair and wheeling her down the drive past the roofing trucks to the cars. And Dad’s following unquestioningly behind, and this is encouraging, you think, as we pull away, headed for their new home.
Their studio room is on the far corner of the building, which makes it possible to pull up right outside and go through just one door and not down any long corridor that might emphatically announce itself to be an institution. Dad opens the car door, looks along the long drive with daffodils and cherry trees and he's actually smiling, appears to love what he’s seeing. We can't quite believe it.
And next we’re in the room and what they’re seeing is a whole lot of familiar things and a familiar rug and familiar pictures and familiar TV with the Sky not yet going but we're working on it oh we're working on it and Dad looks at all and says it's a home away from home. And swear to God he's smiling, beaming in fact. Possibly as though he apprehends that this is indeed their new home and it looks nothing like what he had imagined, feared.
And then as the various staff come to say hello he's smiling broadly and bantering with them and my brother has predicted that he will be like this to strangers but grumble to Mum and this will in fact prove to be true.
But it’s going so much better than we dared to hope, because he is a person of habit and we can see that this place with its very many routines is working a charm on him sufficient for those routines to become his new habits and his new familiar surroundings.
And on the second day he says to Mum, of their new home,
We've been lucky
And on the third day he says,
It’s a good arrangement.
And this might sound measured, but the calibration here is that his highest ever accolade has always been this is most satisfactory and a broad smile.
And he is smiling a lot.
We are relieved beyond words.
That's not to say that things haven’t been going wrong and he will be seeing things differently at that moment. But the staff here have seen all of this before; they know how to help, they know what to do, what to offer, and when.
And in place of a pretty solitary existence, Mum and Dad find themselves in a new more sociable one among people who enjoy their time together, especially the music on Thursday where everyone sings. They love it, just love it, have always loved singing together. They sit with their door open for the world going past. They go out into the courtyard to sit in the morning sun and read the paper and say hello to the others.
The course of their lifetime has shifted again. You dare to imagine these may actually be better years ahead than they might otherwise have been.
I wasn't prepared for this either.