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‘Oh, you know. Same old, same old.’
Except that I didn’t know. Not at all. Even the very worst of my nightmares could never have prepared me for the changes the lost decade had wrought on the woman who had raised me.
‘You probably don’t remember the way,’ Dad said, taking my elbow to steer me down the maze of corridors after signing us both in.
But I did. Leapfrogging over the intervening years, I turned left and right where required until we reached her door. The blue carpet of the hallway had been replaced and was now a forest green, but other than that the place looked – and smelt – exactly as I had remembered it.
‘Faye Chambers,’ I said, softly, my fingers reaching up to trace Mum’s name on the small square card fixed beside her door. The card had yellowed with age. It looked faded and neglected, and that made me sad, but not as much as my dad’s next words.
‘She can’t remember her name these days,’ he said with a break in his voice that I probably wasn’t supposed to hear. ‘She asked me last week who Faye was.’ I had no time to react to this before he pressed down on the door handle and we walked into the two rooms that had become my mother’s world.
In my mind she was always sitting in the chair in the sitting room area of the small suite, looking out at the garden. She would probably be greyer, with a few more lines on her face, but still recognisable as the woman I loved. Except the sitting room area was empty and it looked as though no one had sat in its armchairs for quite some time.
The single bed in the adjacent room had been replaced with a fully functioning hospital one. The guard rails were up on both sides. I had slept in beds just like this for sixteen years of my life. I knew there would be a hand-held device somewhere nearby to raise and lower the bed into no end of different positions, but I very much doubted its occupant knew how to use it.
Despite the name on the door I found myself desperately hoping that we’d wandered into the wrong room, but of course we hadn’t. The woman in the bed was probably still almost as tall as me, but she was a diminished, shrunken version of who I was expecting to see. Her hair wasn’t the grey I’d imagined it would be, but pure snowy white and sparse enough in places to reveal sad glimpses of pink scalp. The lines on her face, especially those running from her nose to her mouth, looked as though they had been gouged with a chisel. Even her lips looked thinner, the fullness I had inherited from her now gone, although admittedly it was difficult to see as they were currently smeared with a layer of something that I guessed was porridge. The carer who’d been patiently spooning the gruel-like substance into my mother’s mouth got to her feet. Her plastic apron crinkled as she moved, and it was covered with spatters of my mother’s breakfast.
I turned to my father, my eyes awash with tears. Why hadn’t he told me things were this bad? His smile was sad and held a thousand regrets. ‘Some days she can still manage to feed herself, but others she just doesn’t have the energy.’ It looked like there had been a great many days when this was the case because the arm Mum lifted to push away the bowl the carer was holding was as spindly as a stick. Her hand appeared to be just bones and skin, marbled with veins.
And yet when she slowly turned her head towards us, I could see that her eyes were still the same. Their shape was mine, and although their colour had long since faded, they were the same ones I had looked into a million times. I smiled into them now and waited for a flicker of recognition that I knew wasn’t going to come.
‘You,’ she said. ‘You came back.’ For a moment I thought my heart would burst with joy, until I noticed that she wasn’t looking at me at all but was focusing on my father. ‘You’ve been here before, haven’t you?’ she asked the man who had made her his bride fifty years earlier.
‘You know who this is, Faye. This is Bill. He comes here to see you every day.’
‘He does?’ questioned the stranger in my mother’s bed, as though the carer was spinning some implausible yarn.
Dad stepped past me, took hold of one of mum’s skeletal hands and raised it to his lips. ‘Forever and ever,’ he murmured softly, as though completing a prayer. Although Mum didn’t exactly respond, she didn’t snatch her hand away and tolerated the graze of his kiss on her skin. I saw it as an encouraging sign. I had been in her room for less than five minutes, and already my expectations had undergone a major readjustment.
The woman who’d taught me how to be the person I was today obediently tilted her face up to the carer as it was wiped clean of the porridge that hadn’t made it to her mouth. I turned my head away, finding it too heart-breaking to watch, only to spot an oxygen tank propped up beside the bedside cabinet. I’d thought dementia was the only demon we were fighting here, but it looked as though Mum’s health was failing too.
I heard the click of the door as the carer left and turned back towards the figure in the bed. ‘Mummy,’ I said sadly. How many years had it been since I’d last called her that? Why had I ever stopped?
Her eyes met mine and there was a kindness in them that I hadn’t expected to see. ‘Are you lost, little girl? Do you need some help? Have you lost your mummy?’
Tears were streaming like a river down my cheeks. There was nothing I could do to stop them. I nodded sadly. ‘I think I have, yes.’
*
‘Oh, Dad,’ I said. My voice wasn’t so much cracking as shattering. ‘Why didn’t you tell me how bad she was?’
Dad was sitting beside me on one of the many benches in the home’s well-tended grounds. ‘I tried… I did say that she wasn’t doing so well these days,’ he countered, addressing his comments not to me but to a bold woodpecker who’d just swooped down from a tree, searching for food on the neatly mown lawn.
‘I thought you just meant that her memory was worse. I didn’t realise she was sick too. What’s wrong with her? Can they treat it?’
He shook his head. ‘It’s old age, my love. Her body is worn out and it’s very, very tired. Eventually it will start to shut down.’
This was worse, so much worse than what I had been expecting.
‘Is she… is she in any pain?’
That brought a smile, of sorts, to my father’s face. ‘No, thank God. She’s not suffering.’ It doesn’t matter how old you are, you still never expect to see your parent cry. It rocked me to see Dad doing so openly now. ‘We’re the ones who are suffering, having to watch her leave us like this. But if that’s the price I have to pay, then I do so willingly. I’d rather it wasmehurting than her.’
*
I could have spent the day wallowing in the sadness of the situation, but I’d already lost so much time with Mum, I couldn’t bear the thought of squandering a single moment of whatever we had left. When Dad and I returned to her room, the carers had given Mum a wash and helped her from the bed to a wheelchair. Dad looked at the NHS-issue chair with delight, as though it represented a small victory. I had an entirely different response, but then I’d spent more time than I had ever wanted to confined to a similar model.
‘It’s always a good day when they can persuade her to get out of bed,’ he declared, with the same excitement that he’d once shown for family celebrations and Christmases. Once again, I felt an internal shift as my expectations realigned to this new normal. ‘I think it’s because she’s pleased to see you,’ he said, squeezing my hand in his. And because he wanted so very much for me to believe it, I allowed myself to pretend it was true.
