October 2016
It’s more difficult to walk through Euston without being recognised since I told one of the Celebrity MasterChef contestants that I wouldn’t feed his turd-like churros to a Labrador. Or another one who came along clutching gazpacho that there was no place in civilised society for his cold soup. But even if my face is a little more recognisable or I’ve got my own Radio 4 show, these things feel a touch hollow. Nothing really matters aside from Mam and Dad. When your heart is in shreds, being pointed at by strangers in Tesco Express isn’t much of a sticky plaster.
On the train I look again through the rental deeds. It’s a large bungalow with many bedrooms, plenty of space and – most important of all – a big dining room with a huge table. It’s close to my brother’s work in the Lake District. It’s a crackpot plan and it might bankrupt me, but it feels right. If we can all eat together every night, we can be like a proper family. We can have one final crack at normal again before it’s taken away. Is this insane? Am I doing the right thing? Can I possibly move back to Cumbria? I’ve cased out all the ways to make life in the Lakes easier. ASDA will deliver food to the bungalow – the nearest one is thirty-five miles away. Amazon Prime will deliver almost anything else I need and leave it in a locker at an Esso garage one mile from the house within around forty-eight hours. There’s a small, rural Co-op with fresh vegetables within two miles; except I can’t drive. In fact I’ve failed my test so many times it deserves its own certificate from the DVLA. I remind myself that my gran and her sisters managed to stay fed and alive in rural Cumberland in the 1920s by sharing one push-bike and killing their own pig. I can make this work. On the train up north, I make a deal with myself that this isn’t going home forever. This isn’t the end of the road. I still own a house in London, even if it is full of cobwebs and dead plants. I’m still a Londoner. I’ll use this time, in a bungalow on a hill caring for a woman with cancer and a man with dementia, to grow spiritually, read all the Booker Prize winners and work on my conversational Mandarin. I don’t have to start wearing GORE-TEX leggings and tying my hair in a top knot all day. I don’t have to start drinking at 4 p.m., like I have been during my mercy missions to Cumbria – by pouring a large glass of Aldi Merlot and having a shuffle through Pick Me Up magazine – even if it feels nice. I can still do my job, can’t I? I just need to be more organised. I can whistlestop home once a month to London, eat four times in different restaurants, grab my post and come back. Also, I need to use my train hours wisely. If anything, this is the year I will finally begin writing the HBO-purchased screenplay that wins me an Emmy. I won’t stay in the North forever. Unless I meet a multi-millionaire septuagenarian landowner with a bad heart who needs a wife. No, not even then.
Dave picks me up at Penrith station.
‘You look knackered, moon face,’ he says.
‘I am,’ I say. ‘How is Dad coping with the bungalow?’
‘He’s roaming around the corridors asking Mam when they’re going home ten times an hour,’ says Dave wearily.
We play Public Enemy all the way back to our new home.
‘Hey, Dad,’ I say, wheeling in two suitcases and an enormous rucksack.
‘Home?’ he says.
‘This is me now. I’m going to stay here for a while full time. I’ve come back.’
Dad begins to speak. In his head it is school home time and I’ve moved his newspaper, which is his only pleasure in life. It is 1970, he’s late for Sergeant’s Mess dinner and he’s lost his right cufflink. Where is yer mam? he asks. Where is yer mam? This is all in the same sentence. All the moments of his life squeezed together to form a note, then expanding back out together. Having emitted the noise, he closes his eyes.
‘It’s not really the big homecoming I imagined,’ I say to Dave, as Dad begins to snore.
We both laugh.
‘Do you want a beer?’ he says, handing me a tin.
Carlisle, March 2017
‘Well, that’s a turn up for the books,’ I say to Dad. He nods at me, but I’m not sure he understands. The nurse at the blood clinic says Dad no longer seems to have diabetes. He weighs six stone eleven – he looks like a little sparrow – but now that he is no longer interested in food, his blood is now in much better shape. Despite the decades of doughnuts and Dairy Milk, Dad hasn’t lost either of his feet. Now he hardly eats at all. This is the tiniest of victories.
It’s 9 a.m. at the infirmary and I’m wearing an oversized man’s North Face fleece jacket over GORE-TEX leggings. All my Shellac nails have fallen off and I am becoming lackadaisical about moustache bleaching. It’s safe to say the standards on Brand Grace Dent have fallen. Today’s breakfast was a piece of millionaire’s shortbread from the charity tuck shop, served to me by one of the Gnome brigade from my old Brownie Pack, who had salt ‘n’ pepper hair and the sort of eye bags that suggested she’d adhered obediently for decades to our Brownie mantra of helping everyone before herself. I have yet to begin writing an Emmy-award-winning rom-com, but I do have some hot tips on how to cajole a man with dementia into drinking a Complan calorie-fortified milk drink while he is shouting ‘fuck off!’
Dad’s behaviour is becoming quite frightening. He makes wild, paranoid accusations that we’ve stolen his belongings. We have killed his cat. We are all in a conspiracy against him. Sometimes he is blunt and really quite cutting, bringing up my appearance, my lack of children, my failed marriage. He says that there’s something wrong with my head. I feign deafness or simply laugh, but later hide in my bedroom and cry angrily. How bloody dare he? I think. He had five kids. Me and Dave are the only ones still here. What if I leave too? The following morning Dad is soft and sweet once more. I’m reminded that I love him again.
After several more months in a haze of guilt and sadness, David and I sneak out for thirty minutes alone in a local pub. We’re exhausted. For a fortnight we’ve watched Mam struggle on, recovering from her latest chemo injections, which we hope will halt the spread in her brain and bone. Mam needs sleep and silence, but Dad’s is up all night, shouting and pacing. We make a pact to find someone who’ll listen to us about Dad. A social worker, a doctor, someone. Every option we think of seems frightening. But we have to do it. Even if this means letting outsiders come into the bungalow, snooping about and judging us for our failings. Even if we have to try and sort out legal power of attorney over Dad’s medical choices, which we’ve read will cost £700 pounds in solicitor’s fees. We have to do these things, even if we both know that by doing them we are setting the ball rolling to splitting us up as a family. We go back and forth endlessly between the pros and cons of keeping us all together or giving Mam a fighting chance of survival by splitting us up. Both choices are terrible. I cry into a warm, stale glass of pub Pinot Grigio and David necks his pint. He sticks his enormous arm around me and says, ‘It’ll be right, we can sort this out.’ His face looks unsure.
We make numerous phone calls and leave messages on answer machines, and eventually a social worker arrives at the bungalow. Her policy seems to be not to talk to us. Dad must explain for himself what’s happening over an informal cup of tea. But the only reliable faculty Dad has left is being able to hide his madness when strangers appear. He softens his face and smiles and answers all her questions very vaguely.
The lady goes away quite happily, telling us she’ll write a report.
Each time we make a small step towards getting a diagnosis, we have a setback and then, as a family, we lose heart in pushing for the truth.
‘I think she’s right. I think he is more or less fine,’ says Mam.
‘Sometimes I don’t think it is as bad as he is making out,’ says Dave.
And then we are back to square one.
April 2017
I’m roasting a chicken for tea and Dad is helping, because nothing goes on in this house that he doesn’t have his nose in. Any rustling of supermarket carrier bags, any raised voices, any arrival through the door in our bungalow in Keswick.
We walk around the tiny Co-op sometimes, me and him, down the aisle together. I never let the trolley, with his small hands attached, out of my sight.
I might only need bits. Dave waits outside for us. We just go there to get out of the house.
‘Whoopsies!’ he’ll say, pointing at a cheap apple pie, reduced from a pound to twelve pence.
‘Whoopsies!’ I’ll laugh and stick it in our trolley.
As lots of the things I loved about my family dissolved or grew frightening, a trip to the supermarket became one of the only things we had left.
I steam some broccoli and add plenty of butter. I shake parboiled potatoes in flour then oil and chuck them in a very hot oven. All Dad’s really bothered about is pudding. Or, better still, a bar of chocolate at the end. I will never see Cadbury’s chocolate without thinking of my father. Cadbury’s purple is love. Cadbury’s purple is us toddling slowly back from the NAAFI shop before he left the forces. And now, in 2017, Cadbury’s is one of the only things I can ever guarantee he will eat.
As I pierce the chicken’s skin to see if the juice is clear, Dad hangs about by the hob. His blue, inky tattoo sags on his lower right arm because his flesh doesn’t fit his body anymore.
I never did get him to answer questions about it. Now I never will. Meanwhile, his questioning of me is constant. The same questions over and over again.
Do I know where his razor is?
Has Mam told me where she put his razors?
It is one of his recurring themes.
‘Mind what yer doin’. Yer don’t wannalerritburn,’ he says as I scrape the pan and make gravy.
‘I’m not lerrin’ it burn,’ I say, my accent still riven with his Merseyside tones. Eventually he loses interest and walks off. The Wi-Fi in the bungalow is so unreliable that I have taken to listening to BBC Radio Cumbria on Dad’s wireless, which plays a heady mix of Perry Como classics and memories of the Dalemain Marmalade Festival. I wonder what is happening in London. Rush hour, fancy launches, restaurants opening their doors for the evening’s service. I’d rather be here; carving the chicken, mashing potatoes, laying roasties in a large bowl beside the buttered broccoli and carrots. I lay everything out on the side in pans so my family can assemble in an orderly queue and serve themselves. Dad can no longer go to Toby’s, as he would find it too frightening. So now I make it come to him.
‘Tea is rrrrrready!’ I shout like a foghorn. I’ve given up calling it dinner.
Mam appears looking pale. Her long blonde hair is now very short and silver. Her pills make her stable but suppress her pleasure in eating. Feeding her meals that she can enjoy is one of my greatest joys. I even love it when she revolts at my attempt to feed her more ambitious things, like couscous, which ‘tastes like the bottom of a parrot cage’. Or tofu, which is ‘deep fried sanitary pad’. Mam’s fighting spirit is in there somewhere. The pilot light is still flickering. I’m on much safer ground if I make a roast dinner.
‘Ooh lovely,’ she says. ‘Chicken.’
‘Get in the queue, you,’ I say. ‘Typical bloody pensioner.’
She laughs and pinches a small, crispy roast potato.
Dad appears and tells me he is not hungry, but I hand him a plate anyway and let him come to the front of the queue.
iPhone note: Things Dad will eat if I am not there.
White toast with butter and cheap marmalade.
He likes a soft, fresh brown roll with a bit of something on it. You need to underplay it when you describe it. Do not call it a cheese roll. Or a ham roll. Call it a small roll with a little bit of cheese.
Toast with strong spready cheese.
Three fish fingers, a little bit of tartare sauce, no bread.
Smoked mackerel flaked on toast with a blob of mayo.
A mild chicken curry ready-meal with rice (don’t bother with naan bread or anything).
Two sausages with a fried egg (or don’t bother with the egg) and ketchup.
Sliced corned beef on a roll with a bit of ketchup.
Chunky veg soup that comes in a plastic carton. Serve him half. No bread.
Tins of Scotch broth soup. He will send back all the bits.
Breaded cod and about eight oven chips. Salt, vinegar, tartare sauce.
A boiled egg (no bread).
Choc-ice, like a Magnum Mini.
Glass of Merlot with dinner. He will find any bottle of port.
October 2017
‘Can I pencil you in for twenty-second of November for MasterChef? It’s you, Jay Rayner and Tom Parker Bowles. Can you be in London for then? Congratulations on the new job by the way! This is huge!’ says Vanessa, my TV agent. I am outside the front door of the bungalow, looking across at Latrigg Fell, trying to let Mam sleep. She is zapped on injections and strong pills. Dad is asleep too. Or at least I thought he was.
Inside the hallway I can hear a clattering. A drawer opening and closing.
‘Thank you,’ I say quietly, as I’ve not told anyone up north yet. Saying yes to it was ludicrous. ‘Hang on, Vanessa – Dad, what do you need?’
I’ve found Dad’s wandering stage the hardest.
First you hear a rustle. Then the familiar sounds of someone searching for something. Kitchen cupboards open, then close again. Drawers creak open, back and forth, and then the footsteps head back to the bedroom and back to the corridor, wandering between the lounge and the kitchen.
Rooting through the phone table’s drawer. Things being overturned again and again in the drawer. And then silence. And then five minutes later the whole routine happens again from the start.
‘What have you lost, Dad?’ I say. Dad is examining pens, some old receipts, an old phone cable, and putting them back in the drawer again.
Sometimes Dad is very annoyed about this missing item. Sometimes he’s quiet. But it’s always the same item. His razor.
‘Mam brought me a razor home from shopping,’ he says. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Do you think it’s in the drawer?’
His expression looks wary, like I am trying to trick him.
‘I – well, I dunno,’ he says. ‘I’m lookin’ for it.’
We have bought Dad two different electric razors. We find them broken up into pieces; the cogs, the batteries, the innards all taken out and unravelled.
As my father’s translator-in-chief, my guess is he can feel the hair growing on his face, which makes him want to shave. However, when he is faced with the mirror he doesn’t recognise himself or grasp what needs to be done. If me or Dave try to shave him ourselves, he becomes angry. If Dave takes him to the barber, we have to pretend that it is perfectly normal to be taken there like a child, but we have no idea how he will react, once he’s there.
And then the hair grows back in a couple of days anyhow, and the pattern begins again. Searching.
‘Dad,’ I say, ‘give me a minute. I’ll look for it. Sit down, I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
Sometimes distraction with tea or cake works.
Up and down the corridor he walks, up and down, looking. Overturning boots in the shoe rack and looking behind coats and opening and closing that same drawer.
‘Dave bought me a new razor yesterday,’ he says again.
Sometimes he sounds so convincing.
And this is possible.
We are all so tired and no longer relaying information to each other. We are all becoming mad. Mam hasn’t slept properly for weeks. Dad will not let her out of his sight. If I separate him from her, he asks again and again where Mam has gone. When he wakes in the night to wander around, he wants Mam to be awake too.
Then, one morning, in the midst of the madness, a job offer. The Guardian newspaper wonder if I’d consider the role of restaurant critic; not merely reviewing in London, but right across the British Isles. Fifty-two columns per year, plus Christmas holiday specials. I can write about Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Northern Ireland, wherever I want, sometimes even in Europe. The online site is read widely in America and Australia. I read the email quietly at 5 a.m. while drinking Gold Blend on the bungalow step. Even considering this offer feels selfish. I’d need to be away more. But these jobs come up very rarely. How can I possibly say no?’
November 2017
Despite Dad falling out of bed quite badly, hurting his head and back, he seems to be having quite a good day out at the Cumberland Infirmary with his kids. He’s chirpier now than when we went to Alton Towers in the Eighties. He’s telling jokes, reciting poetry we’ve never heard before and is in great spirits. My patience, on the other hand, is threadbare. The staff have lost Dad’s admission form. I do not recognise myself sometimes these days. I am always angry. The fury bubbles behind my eyes permanently, but I can’t pinpoint why. I’m furious about the bleak existential reality that everything we love and hold dear must grow old, fragile and die at some time, which I’ve sort of always known but have ignored all my life, but here it is in living colour – or rather, here it is in the greys and browns and sludge-like shades of NHS buildings and in the stench of disinfectant and in the chaos of lost admission notes.
‘Hello, Mr Dent, how are you?’ says a nurse, sweeping the curtains aside as she goes.
Dad says something surreal. Skirting board? Orange? Army?
‘Dad has dementia,’ I say to the new nurse. I’ve told the last three nurses.
She nods at me as if she is listening, but she is not. It is not on his medical record as we have no diagnosis and the nurse is so busy herself she doesn’t have time to decipher whether I’m telling the truth.
‘So, Mr Dent, are you taking any medication right now? Do you know off-hand the names of what you are taking?’ she says. ‘Are you registered with a GP in Carlisle?’
‘Dad has dementia,’ I say. ‘Can you ask me these questions? I can tell you the answers.’
She ignores me.
‘Do you know your date of birth?’ she says. ‘1973,’ he says
‘No, you’re older than that.’
The nurse laughs.
But I’m not laughing.
Me and Dave sit for hours after this in the corridor of the Cumberland Infirmary, in a cramped walkway with a queue of elderly people lying on trolleys. The vending machines are all empty, so I can’t even get Dad some Dairy Milk. The automatic door is broken. It feels like a terrible humanitarian disaster has happened, but it hasn’t; this is just an average Saturday in a regional NHS hospital.
We are finally called in to see yet another nurse. ‘Hello, Mr Dent,’ she says. ‘Now, what happened to you today? Are you on any medication right now? I need to check some details. Now, who is your doctor?’
‘Hello, I’m his daughter. My father has dementia. Can you ask me these questions? It will be faster.’
‘Has he?’ says the woman.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘OK, Mr Dent, what is your date of birth?’ she says, carrying on regardless. ‘Where is your admission form? Did you bring any paperwork with you?’
‘That paperwork went missing,’ I say.
‘OK, why don’t we start that form again from the beginning? George, are you registered with a GP in Carlisle? What is your postcode?’
‘Liverpool, I’m a Scouser,’ says my father.
‘You live in Liverpool?’
‘My father has dementia,’ I say again. I need to get Dad a diagnosis.
‘OK, we’re just going to pop you back in the corridor for a while, then maybe we should start that admission form again. I think it was probably left on the side by the ambulance when you were having the X-ray. Are you the daughter?’ the nurse says.
‘Yes, I’m the daughter,’ I say.
‘This is my little girl,’ says Dad, smiling. I reach out and hold his hand.
Carlisle, 1981
The vestibule door opens. I can hear the television in the living room playing Nationwide with Frank Bough louder now. My father is standing there with a plate. He lets out a laugh when he sees me.
‘Worryadoin’ in here, princess?’ he says.
‘I wanna sleep here,’ I say.
‘Yer Mam said. You wanna live in the vestibule?’
‘Yeah, just for tonight. I wanna sleep here.’
‘You’ve got a screw loose, you have,’ he says.
‘No, I’ve not,’ I say. But even at this early age I know I have a bit.
‘Mam says you’ve gotta eat some of your tea,’ he says. He passes me the plate with cheese-and-ham Findus Crispy Pancakes and a Birds Eye Potato Waffle with a curly smile of tomato sauce.
‘Oh, I forgot the fork,’ he says.
‘S’OK,’ I say, taking the plate.
‘Why do you wanna sleep here?’ he says.
‘I like it better here,’ I say.
The vestibule is freshly painted and feels fancy. Like my own private kingdom.
‘You’ll get cold,’ he says. ‘And you don’t like spiders.’
‘There won’t be any spiders,’ I say.
He knows I’ll scream the house down at the sight of a daddy-long-legs.
Dad disappears again and comes back with one of his big old work jackets that he wears to the warehouse.
‘OK, put this over you, then you won’t get cold,’ he says.
Now I am warm and snuggly.
I eat my tea and then I get sleepy.
Later, I wake up on the cold, hard floor. I can hear Porridge playing and Dad laughing loudly.
The next time I wake up I’m lying in my own bed.
November 2017
‘Where would you say Carlisle is, George?’
I shift uncomfortably in my seat in the Memory Clinic.
‘Where’s Carlisle?’ the woman repeats.
Dad does not answer.
I feel the pain of the silence acutely.
‘Have you heard of it?’
He smiles. As if he’s about to make a joke to cover up his shame. This is one of his tactics.
‘Can you have a guess?’ she says. He doesn’t.
The woman marks something down in her notes.
I look her directly in the eye, hoping for some comeback.
She looks away sharply.
Two weeks later we have it in print. A diagnosis. Dad has vascular dementia. There’s no sense of relief. Just numbness.
January 2018
‘I was in town before,’ he says to me.
‘Were you, Dad?’ I say.
I am mashing a vast pan of Maris Pipers with butter and cream. There are sausages in the oven. I have frozen peas in the microwave, powdered gravy in a jug and a bag of Aunt Bessie’s frozen Yorkshires on a baking sheet waiting to go.
If we all eat together then we are still a family. No matter what. Those are the rules, aren’t they? How can it be the end if we’re all still eating sausage and mash?
‘And I saw this fella,’ Dad rambles. ‘He says, he says to me, “Oi, Scouse!” He says, “Hey, Scouse!” So I looked at him and it was … oh, I forget his name. Clive. Clive. Used to work with him. Helluvanice lad. Anyway. He had a little cat. A cat in a bag.’
My father is in a chatty mood. He has not left the house on his own for some months, although in his head he was in town just this morning.
All of us have our own tactics for dealing with my dad’s confabulations; Mam tries to correct him when he talks, but this just makes him angry. He can’t understand why she’s undermining him and thinks she’s doing it just to be awkward. Dave humours him. I try to draw the memory out. I like to squeeze it a bit further to see where it’s going. I slip in questions about his daughters and his son when he’s off his guard. But I cannot get any sense out of him. It feels a bit duplicitous. I’ve not popped back to London for weeks. My first Guardian columns have gone out to a largely positive reaction, but to get them done I’ve been leaning on Dave hard to keep an eye on things while I rush to Manchester and Birmingham. I have been writing from 5 a.m. until 2 p.m. and then trying to snatch naps while Dad and Mam have their afternoon snooze. Although I’ve learned the hard way about this; I opened my eyes last week to find that Dad had found my handbag, taken two sets of keys from the front pouch, unlocked the front door, then the porch door, and was behind the wheel of the Volvo, starting the engine. I cannot forgive myself. I keep imagining him in an overturned car on fire in a field or squashing kids on a zebra crossing.
‘Grace, look at me, I’m on that hill,’ Dad says, pointing out of the window.
‘Oh yes, I see,’ I say, stirring the gravy.
My tactic is to allow the fantasies, to just let them flow, as he looks happy. I like the communication. It’s something, but even that is slipping away now. I know it can’t last forever.
As sections of his brain furl up, he has trouble, when speaking, differentiating between thoughts and reality. If he looks out of the window up at the hill and his brain wants to make small talk about how cold it might be up there, he’ll say, ‘’Ere, Gracie, look at me blowing about on the hill. I am there, can you see me?’
‘Ooh. Are you?’ I say. ‘Which one are you? You’ll be tired when you get back, won’t you?’
‘Yes, I’ll get blown off and land in the field.’
He laughs and walks off.
He is happy. And I’m happy to have communicated.
The problem with this tactic is that by the end of the day you are both as doolally as each other.
And every day of this madness is conducted in a haze of grief, but ambiguous grief, as you’re bereaved of the person you love while babysitting their shell. Mam wonders if the diagnosis is an exaggeration. Maybe he needs a vitamin B12 injection? Maybe he is putting it on? We all agree he can’t go into care.
May 2018
It is 1 a.m. and in a matter of hours I am supposed to be going to London on the 10.11 Penrith to Euston train to film MasterChef and then coming back via Leeds to review a restaurant, but Dad is in a small ball curled up on one side of his bed.
I think he is breathing.
I get very close.
He is breathing. He has not stood up for four days. I cannot get him to drink water. I take some bread with marmalade and a small square of chocolate, but I can’t convince him to eat. Not even Dairy Milk Fruit & Nut. Is this what dying looks like? Or is he just tired? Or depressed? I look on the Internet to see if this is a stage of death. Me and Dave have not been able to wash him for weeks. He screams and shouts if we mention it. I think Dad is dying, but then he could possibly just be very dehydrated. How do you force someone to drink?
I look up bedsores. Rickets. Malnutrition.
I look up undertakers.
I look up Alzheimer’s care homes. Outreach groups. The images are always of smiling people holding chinchillas from a local petting zoo. My father, I am quite sure, would rather be dead than do group activities.
Dad hates enforced fun. He never did a flippant thing or a hobby in his life. My father is ex-military, he is rough and wily, he does not do arts and crafts. I feel like I’m betraying him by even considering humiliating him in this way. Also, how would he act if he got there? He can be so cruel with his words.
But in the backgrounds of these pictures of dementia groups there are always people around me and my brother’s age.
Relatives. Carers.
I want to hold my hand out and say, look, we are here too. Please help us. But I am too scared. Also, if we let other people into this situation, they could take events out of our hands.
I snap the laptop shut.
Dad is on his side in a ball. I check his breath with my hand in front of his face, then get into bed and wonder if he will last the night. At 6 a.m. he is still breathing. David tells me to go to London, so I set off for Penrith Station and hope Dad lasts until I get back.
June 2018
I cannot tell you about the weeks before my father stopped living with us.
Some of the things that he did. It was not him.
It was another person.
And I’ll always feel that I let him down. I couldn’t make him drink or eat, no matter what I cooked.
I knew under my watch he was going to die sooner than he should.
But the fact is that leaving him in his little room in the care home while he was crying, promising him I would definitely come back, has robbed me of a bit of my heart which will never grow back.
July 2018
Visiting Dad plays on my mind for at least seventy-two hours before I go. On trains, in hotel rooms and when I close my eyes to sleep. I must go. I must go. But it’s a cloud over my day before I set off and I feel worse when it’s done.
Dad is a skull in a chair.
Time, for him, is like a concertina. Opening and closing in the same sentence.
I sit in his little room. He sits on the side of his bed like an inmate.
Sometimes he cries. He cries for Mam, who he never sees – except Dave brought her to visit him yesterday, he just didn’t recognise her.
He cries because I am keeping things from him.
He cries because he is a burden to me.
I like it best when he sleeps, as he is peaceful. I put on mid-afternoon reruns of Emmerdale and sit by the radiator in the room that no longer has a carpet – he cannot have carpet anymore, as he can’t be trusted to tell anyone he needs the loo.
‘Do you remember A Touch of Frost, Dad? Do you remember our Alsatian, Cilla?’
His mind is a snowstorm of fragments that partially happened and dreams and nightmares he firmly believes are true.
‘Jesus is there in the roof tiles,’ he says.
‘The lads had all their sheepdogs out and I was referee.’
‘There is a little cat in this room, Gracie, can you hear it?’
August 2018
In the main common room at the care home, a young woman from a local petting zoo has brought some live animals to show the residents.
A guinea pig.
A mouse.
A salamander.
‘Everyone is in there,’ says one of the ladies, beckoning me in.
I creep in at the back.
My dad is on the front row. Front and centre.
Almost everyone in the group has dementia.
I stand by the wall beside the weekly meals’ menu, written in bright colours in Comic Sans.
Dad is engrossed in the guinea pig. He is soft and child-like, just like the people in the adverts I’ve seen for the dementia care groups. Like a little boy at nursery school.
He always loved animals.
The girl places the small bundle of fluff in his hands and he cuddles it to his chest, but he’s clearly a little scared of it too.
August 2018
Mam and me are having a pot of tea and sultana scones together at 3 p.m. in a garden centre just outside Carlisle. It’s the kind of simple thing we haven’t been able to do for a very long time. For months leaving the house with Dad or without Dad was impossible.
I imagined things might be easier once we had moved him to the care home and he had nurses who could safely wash him and feed him and even boss him around a little without him screaming abuse. Also, his room has an alarm, so now he couldn’t escape and get into the road or fall downstairs or set fire to anything.
But things are not easier, they are just differently hard.
Now Dad’s gone, there’s no wandering and no searching. He’s no longer sleeping for so long that we have to go in and check he’s breathing. There’s no more worrying and putting off what will happen next. We just have much more time to think.
When we get back from the garden centre we sit in the lounge, me and Mam. Her treatment is ongoing, which means endless trips to the hospital for injections and pills. She is still stable but completely exhausted.
Day after day after day, we tell each other that we’ll ‘take it easy’, but instead we end up fraught, conducting a laborious post-mortem of what has led us to this point.
It is all we can talk about.
It is the only thing to talk about.
Dad.
At least some of the stories are grimly funny. I remind her about the time I picked her up from hospital with him in tow, and in a blink between paying for the taxi and entering the building I lost him. Then, after some frantic searching, numerous elevator journeys and a tannoy call-out, I found him in the cafeteria running about pushing a wheelchair. It was very Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em.
‘The daft bugger,’ says Mam, laughing. ‘We should have left him there then.’
I remind her about when he began to carry a leather flight bag around with him everywhere, even in the house, full of surreal items that he had decided were today’s treasure. Me and Dave used to play a game called ‘What is in the bag today?’ One evening, after a particularly manic day, Dad fell asleep and we checked inside to find five neatly folded bobble hats.
‘That bloody bag,’ she laughs. ‘He looked like Roy Cropper off Corrie. I put it in the bin one day and he fished it out.’
We talk about the beginning, years and years ago, when he started to leave the front door open, and then the car door standing wide open in supermarket car parks. And how he’d become lost on short shopping trips out and would then wait by the front door of the shop, furious that he had been abandoned.
We take all the pieces apart like a puzzle and put them back together over and over again. The accusations about a conspiracy, all the screaming and shouting and anger over imaginary events. How it all became less easy to be sympathetic about, and how eventually he was just plain frightening.
Mam is so tired. She has been chained to all of this for so many years. But now he has gone and she no longer wants to live freely. How can she just go out for a scone at a garden centre? Why should she live in freedom when we’ve put him in jail?
We talk and talk. Sometimes we get cross with each other and sit in separate rooms – me at her for not accepting this is what it is: this is us now. We could not get food, liquids or medication into him. We could not bathe him. He fell lots of times. Some very dangerous things happened when we were tired. We must try to move through this bit and see him being looked after properly as a positive. We can visit! Mam is frustrated at me for not saying that perhaps this is temporary.
‘Maybe Dad will get better once he has had a rest too, and then we can get him home,’ she says.
We argue, fall out and fall back in. I tell her I love her.
I try to make her laugh.
I remind her again about when he got hold of the car keys. This was not funny at all while it was happening. It could have been horrific.
I remind her of the months he pretended he was almost paraplegic and couldn’t move his legs or arms, but when no one was looking he was fine, like the guy from Little Britain. That is actually pretty funny, on reflection.
Dad is no longer here, but he is still in every room we sit in for weeks and weeks and months and months. Dad’s space at the table will always be empty. The wound I have about Dad only ever seems to grows the slenderest of scabs. The merest memory makes it bleed.
Things I miss about Dad
I miss when he ate the last roast potato at dinner and shouted, ‘It’s the fast and hungry in this house, Gracie.’
I miss when he described stupid folk by saying, ‘He’s about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.’
I miss him mispronouncing words to wind me up. Profiteroles as ‘Profunferelos’, Yacht as ‘yachet’.
I miss him referring to my mother as ‘Mein Führer’.
I miss how he couldn’t buy any item of clothing without it having a specific named purpose. ‘I got these trousers for wearing to the lock-up,’ he’d say. ‘I got this jacket for walking the dog.’ ‘I got these pants for going for breakfast on the cruise.’ If you wanted him to accept a new item, you had to sell its unique purpose. ‘Happy Christmas, Dad! I got you these socks to put on if you’re defrosting the car.’
I miss our shared black, twisted sense of humour. I once made him a sign in a medieval font that said, ‘The Floggings will continue until Morale improves’, which hung in the kitchen.
I miss him grassing me up to Mam to save his own skin during a silly family row, then jigging about in the background, mouthing, ‘Your turn! Your turn! Your turn!’
I miss watching Fawlty Towers and Billy Connolly live on VHS.
I miss sending him Beryl Cook postcards of round-bottomed ladies in jacuzzis.
I miss listening to Johnny Cash albums in the car with him.
I miss him saying, ‘Oh, leave her alone, she’s only a little lass,’ which he did even when I was forty.
I miss the WD-40, spare change, dust and random pieces of wood he left about the house.
I miss all these things and a million more.
‘Does he still recognise you?’ my friends ask when I explain why I’m no longer around.
‘Sometimes,’ I say. But I leave it there. I don’t explain anything else.
Because in the moments when he recognises me, he is Dad. He’s there. His facial muscles – very briefly – arrange themselves how they once did. But then he’s gone again. It’s over. And having him back for a few seconds just leaves me sore.