19th February 2010

A Chaplain’s Diary

 

A Senior Moment

Sniff the air carefully

The smell of urine used to pervade the whole house.  Now that she’s in a nursing home we seem to have left that smell behind.  The sheets are washed in a special detergent and the carpets are regularly deodorised.  When we were looking for a nursing home for my mother we were told to sniff the air carefully.  A good nursing home these days doesn’t need to smell.  The other tip we were given is to ask what sort of bread was used for breakfast.  If it’s white sliced that’s the last thing that old people need, it simply concretises in the gut and causes constipation.  At that age slimy, white sliced is no substitute for wholemeal bread with its high fibre content.  I suppose it makes sense when you think about it but who has their wits about them when they are putting their mother into a home. The very words themselves smell of rejection, an avoidance of duty and a lack of love. In fact decisions in such a situation are not only guilt-driven but they tear at the heartstrings. Having to do the very thing we had always promised we never would and never in our heart of hearts wanted to do – to put mother into a home.

 

Dog hairs everywhere

I should have guessed.  It really wasn’t like my mother to let the bathroom get in such a mess.  Admittedly for years we’d always had a cleaner because both my parents worked but they were now retired and Mrs Smith had died.  Even so my mother knew how to clean a bath and hoover around, not that you’d have known it from the state of the house.  It began to smell, there were dog hairs everywhere and she just didn’t seem to care – and that wasn’t my mother.  Looking back it was obvious that my father had covered up for her for years – almost frightened we would find out and take her away.  I couldn’t understand why the bath and toilet mats had been carefully laid by her bed, not that she slept in it because at one stage she insisted on sleeping on the settee with the dog because she thought he was lonely. 

 

Twilight syndrome

I now understand why my father said they couldn’t come to stay at Christmas; he was terrified that we would suddenly see the situation for what it was.  In fact one Christmas she wouldn’t open her presents and said she was saving them for later. That was easy to live with compared with some of the other problems. She would suddenly take against people for no apparent reason and become totally unreasonable.  Perhaps what is known as the ‘twilight syndrome’ became the most distressing part of the day - the early evening when things just got worse.  My father would phone up in a great state asking if I would explain to my mother that he had not emptied the bank account, fathered another child, murdered his grandchildren or equally unlikely, bizarre behaviour.  All we could do from a distance was to persuade him to make sure that he gave her the prescribed medication but then he was inevitably accused of trying to poison her. 

 

On the eighth floor

Things went missing, she lost her earrings, her wedding ring disappeared, lifelong friendships were ruined because she was rude to people and she even got lost for six hours in the hospital because my father who had had a stroke couldn’t move around to look for her and was too proud to ask.  In the early days, before we had really realized what the situation was like, they had come on a Pilgrimage I was leading to the Holy Land.   On the first morning their room was stifling and when I asked why they didn’t open a window my mother explained that people had been trying to climb in during the night– if that had been the case it would have been some feat worthy of the Guinness Book of Records because they were on the eighth floor! 

 

Bizarre behaviour

My brother’s wedding was a nightmare. She refused to be smartened up for the occasion and at the buffet helped herself to vast amounts of cold salmon that it was obvious she was incapable of eating.  Her behaviour became more bizarre over the years.  One day she hid all the house keys and we couldn’t get out. Pleading was useless and anyway she could not even remember hiding them-never mind where she had hidden them. The illness  seems to go through different phases. Perhaps the worst part was a sixth month period when she was constantly horrible and rude to my father.  She claimed not to know him and wanted him out of the house because he didn’t live there. “Who’s the old man in the corner?” she would ask. Fortunately they had always been desperately in love and they had enough reserves to offset against it but it drove my father to tears.  Ironically because my father died first he never saw her die and because of her dementia she was never aware of him dying.  In fact at his funeral she claimed to have had a lovely day and was quite surprised that my father had not shown up for the occasion.  She was the one who we thought would hold things together in old age because my father had always been the creaking gate but he finished up nursing her and covering up for her. Its strange how life works out.

 

Glazed, vacant look

Now she’s in a home.  It doesn’t matter whether it was a week or a month since I last went to see her because “time” is meaningless.  She sits there and like so many others, she’s in another place where you cannot reach her but when you’ve seen it you can recognise it a mile off. The couple walking along the street – one in control, the other hanging on their arm with that slightly glazed vacant look…..they can present well for a while with just the right answers but then the whole edifice crumbles after five minutes because the pretence cannot be kept up.

 

Her mind has gone

My parents saved all their lives but we are now seeing it all spent on nursing homes – whilst those who lived for the moment are funded by the State.  Each month silently and relentlessly £1600 slips out of the account presumably until we hit the magical finance figure  when the State, no doubt after a tussle, will assume responsibility.  The house is sold, the wedding ring is lost and her mind has gone.  She just sits there in clothes we don’t recognise, speaking to the man in the chair beside her as though he were my father but not recognising any of us.

 

Alzheimer’s Day

Now I tell you this, not for sympathy – I don’t need any and anyway the responsibility now falls largely on my brother’s shoulders because he lives nearby.  Nor because I want to be sensational but to open your eyes, as if you needed it, to this situation repeated 100 times in homes around this island.  I’m glad that Alzheimer’s Day and the Alzheimer’s Society is slowly being recognised at last.  We are told by the Daily Bulletin that there are over 8,000 sufferers on Mallorca alone and that figure is set to increase as the population slowly ages and lives longer.  Like alcoholism it’s one of those illnesses that partners and family cover up.  Behind many a door and many a curtain dementia creeps ever onwards in an increasingly aged community. Dementia sufferers have no past and no future – they just live in the present.  Meanwhile the sheets are washed yet again, the uncalled for outburst explained away and the knickers in the cutlery drawer are discreetly removed.  Sometimes it’s so imperceptible that it’s hardly noticed.  The man’s a bit batty and the woman’s a bit loopy.  In fact, as many of us say each day, when we can’t remember what we were looking for, it becomes a constant ‘senior moment’ or a ‘craft’ episode (you don’t know that one? It’s “can’t remember a f….g thing!”)  Yet we do remember Harold Wilson, Iris Murdoch and Ronald Reagan and we marvel at Terry Pratchett as he shares his decline with us knowing that one day his story may be ours.

 

Father Robert Ellis is the Anglican Chaplain of Majorca

St Philip and St James Church

Nunez de Balboa 6

Son Armadans

Palma 07014

Tel: 971 737279

E mail:anglicanpalma@gmail.com

www.anglican-mallorca.org