Introductory remarks

One of the things I didn’t think to mention when I wrote about the benefits of attending writing courses is that you have a safe opportunity to experiment with a genre or subject you would not normally tackle.

The following article is a case in point. It deals with my experience of my mother’s dementia. The writing prompt was, I think, “a traumatic event”. Dementia is a traumatic event for everyone concerned, and what makes it especially traumatic I think is that it happens slowly. So slowly that you don’t even realise that’s what’s going on.

“Oh, she keeps forgetting things, it must be her age”, you say. But then more and more odd things start to happen, with more and more memory lapses. At least, that was our experience, and other people I’ve spoken to found the same.

I’m a fairly private person, so I normally would not write about stuff like this. Also, generally speaking the most traumatic events I’m prepared to write about are things like not being able to get an internet connection. So this exercise was quite a departure for me.

I tried to write a dispassionate article. It was an attempt to find a middle way between a purely objective approach (how could I have done that even if I had the requisite scientific knowledge?), and the kind of subjective approach that invites people (on social media especially) to commiserate, provide well-meaning homilies, and a metaphorical shoulder to cry on. You must be the judge of whether or not I succeeded.

Here is the article, which was published in an anthology of creative writing called Between The Lines. If you wish to comment on it, please do so by email.

The Long Goodbye

Most of us live purposeful, contiguous, continuous lives. We do X in the hope of accomplishing Y. Life may intervene and cause us to reach Z instead, but at that point we can take a decision. Do we strive to get back on track to Y, or accept Z, or plan for something else entirely? The point is, we live in the present, but have at least one eye on the future. 

Those with dementia don't enjoy such luxury. Their lives are somehow discontiguous with the real world, somehow not quite involved with objective space and time. They may do X with the intention of achieving Y, but their starting point is not one we would recognise. And tomorrow they will do X again regardless of the consequences they experienced today, because they live constantly in the present. 

Practitioners of Eastern mystic religions exhort us to live in the present, to 'be here, now'. To that extent, dementia sufferers might be presumed to have reached Enlightenment. But their present is not our present. They may believe, for instance, that 'now' is fifty years ago, and everything is seen through that lens. So their starting point, their 'X', is not one that 'outsiders' would easily recognise. 

And because everything seems to reset each day (I can think of no other way of putting it), they appear not to learn from the experience. 

Therefore their lives are fragmented, somehow discontinuous, discontiguous. So when I recall the last years of my mother, who suffered from dementia, I remember fragments: disjointed pieces of a jigsaw which are independent yet tell a larger story. 

Fragment 1: 

My mother and I are enjoying a cup of tea and some cake, when she suddenly looks worried. 

"Are you ok, mum?", I ask. 

"I can't remember if I locked the shop up." 

"Don't worry, I'll check on the way home." 

The shop she was referring to was the one she'd sold when she retired, thirty years previously. 

Fragment 2: 

My mother was spotted striding down the road. The police brought her back to her flat in a sheltered housing complex. When they asked her where she was going, she had replied "Home, to Stoke Newington". That was indeed where she lived – seventy years ago. 

The story told by such fragments is one of loss. Each time you see that person, there is something missing, there is somehow a bit less of them. They are disappearing. 

When someone dies, there is a period of mourning, a formal period that starts with their death, involves certain procedures or practices, and ends after a set time. There is also a period of grieving, which doesn't end, but lessens over time. When someone has dementia, they are still alive, so you cannot begin to mourn their loss. But the grieving starts, and becomes worse over time. 

One cold, rainy night in November, my mother's care home phoned at around 11 pm to tell me that my mother had passed away. 

I had the best night's sleep I'd had in years.