DEMENTIA CARE: MEMORIES OF THOSE WHO ARE GONE.

(Just fucking had it today with the formatting bullshit on this revamped platform. Fuck it. Better to post today with a few visual glitches, than post tomorrow looking a tiny bit better.)

Here’s a photie o’ a dreich day in the land o’ tamed unicorns and wild haggis.

It took months to write an obituary. Months during which I remembered and remembered and remembered the woman who is  gone. Sadly, no...happily...she played an active role in supporting me as a dementia carer.
   And sadly that support is gone. I have support elsewhere to keep me going. Don’t have the option – so I keep going.
   It’s been a difficult morning. Some days are better than others. What does that mean? It means a mild difficulty in getting through pills this morning.
   Only mild, though, and partly my fault on the organisation front. The real difficulty came with eating a small pot of food. I’m guessing there wasn’t a lot of sleep last night. Tackling this small pot was a major effort.
   We were interrupted by the daily carer. The one with the same name as the woman our family lost to cancer. Our plan was to keep her alive in the memory, and not tell my mother she was gone. Just in case. For reasons. And there you go. In walks a carer with the same name. That could trigger so many conversations.
   The rest of routine goes according to routine.
   Here I am now, thinking of those who are gone. My mother is gone. Today she was very deeply gone, lost in a cycle of randomness that goes nowhere and stands in the way of every pill, of toothpaste on a brush, of food into the belly.
   She’s been gone for so long. Her niece has been gone for hardly any time at all, though it feels like a million years already. My last contact with her was a hug goodbye and making sure she made it from the back door to her car without falling over. A wave and the car moved off.
   Our last meeting.
   I think of the person my mother used to be. She’s there, still, in glimpses, in shadows, in glimmers, and in great gleaming beams of light that spark up and fade almost instantly. I think of my cousin and…
   What to say of her? Anecdotes. Over the past few months I’ve kept her alive by remembering all the mad things she did. Sometimes, she’d attract madness to her even when she wasn’t doing anything.

Here’s this photo of a parking place overlooking a dreich Scottish landscape. We were driving around from here to there and she stopped off at this place. It was convenient for parking if she drove through the area and had to stop. At least you had a view of something, even if that something happened to be the cold grey dreichscape below.
   I had my camera with me, and she urged me to take a photie. Eventually, I did. There was a wee guy standing by, doing fuck all about fuck all. So there he is, this comedy genius, who decides to run into shot as I go to take the picture.
   What the fuck?! I burst out laughing and forget to take the picture. We are all laughing. And she’s in the front of the car, asking me if I took the picture. The wee guy runs around again, with his arms out to his sides, trying to get into shot again.
   Every time I bring the camera up, he runs in, heading around the car in a big circle. And I lower the camera as I laugh and laugh and laugh. We’re all laughing. The wee guy is laughing. It’s the brand of madness that my cousin draws to her.

Couldn’t go anywhere with her, without laughing. I was reminded of the comedy sketch from Chewin’ the Fat, with a character ready to take a photograph. The cry goes up, interrupting the shot.

Nae danger!

I was waiting on this wee guy shouting that oot. You can’t go and park somewhere without laughter intruding. It was the same, one time, she asked me to go shopping with her. This was before the dementia kicked in, and so we are there in this shop and my mother phones my cousin to ask her how she is.
   The timing of it was hilarious. You had to be there. We stood in a near-empty shop. An assistant was through in the other area, keeping a respectable distance. And we are passing this telephone back an’ furrit, tryin’ no’ tae pee ourselves laughing.
   Some people have letters after their names. My cousin was a founder member of the order of PMSL.
   I think of these anecdotes. The laughter, wherever she went. In a few of those text messages to me, speaking of her treatment for cancer, she was still cracking jokes. What the fuck else was she going to do? She didn’t like the thought of my death. Her job, being younger, was to outlive me…
   Yes, I’d seen her sad. And I saw her scared. Mostly, though, I saw her happy when she wasn’t laughing her head off. Life should have dealt her a far better hand, stacked with Aces and bonus coupons, magic tickets and golden slippers. Well it didn’t. But she fucking laughed anyway.
   Onywey.
   I’m struggling to think of a person who had as much laughter in her as she did. Plenty of sadness, sure. We’re Scottish, and we all have that. I ran through the streets with her as a child and I sat laughing with her in a car as an eejit ran past.
   No, he never made it into any of the photos.
   My memory keeps her alive. And my memory keeps my mother’s image alive. Those two women dragged me into yet another shopping expedition and we were all PMSL by the halfway-point.
   I won’t go into details. They almost knocked a ladder over, and that would only have added to the hilarity. Truly, you had to be there. A woman with a broom up her arse tried to offer me handy bogus advice on measuring a piece of furniture. She was rubbish. Mother and cousin could barely contain themselves.
   The woman walked off in one direction. Family rounded a corner in the other direction, almost colliding with the ladder. They were urging me over in stage whispers so that they could say something really truly important.
   I would never guess what. Well, clearly I guessed. But I had to go over anyway, and try to steer them away from the ladder. Wheezing. Coughing. Spluttering. These women, bent double. Gasping for air. They both struggled to say…
   “That wumman…”
   Another collapse into gales of laughter. Okay, I am laughing now. And you had to be part of it to get the joke. Both of those members of my family are gone. One was taken by cancer. The other is lost to dementia.
   No one is around to remember these anecdotes but me. I struggled, weighed down by the sadness of it, to write up a blog post featuring the text messages going back and forth. Her obituary. And…
   Okay, I recreate anecdotes here that you had to be there for…and here, washing a lot of the detail away, you can’t get at the humour. And that’s okay. My status as Keeper of the Memories remains intact, even if I share the haziest of outlines on a blog.
   It wasn’t enough to publish those text messages and create an obituary. I had to come back here, after, and remember things. An idiot, racing around a car in circles. The ladder, almost knocked over. Telephone conversations.
   Sitting on our knees, setting up text communication between us for the first time. Four feet apart, laughing like fuck as we rapidly wrote daft comments to each other. Then read them aloud so we could laugh all over again.
   Her visits into the world of the dementia carer became more complex, guarded, until she left to fight cancer. And she fought that first fight well. Deterioration, or progression, take your pick…deterioration is the name of the game when it comes to noting dementia’s advance…
   If my cousin hadn’t developed cancer, then her visits would have scaled back as I moved deeper into the world of dealing with dementia’s advance in my mother mind. People stop coming around for a reason. Get used to that. It is for the best.
   My cousin is gone. And my mother is gone. Regular visitors, the people in my mother’s life, are all gone, too. I can think of maybe one visitor who would still appear no matter what, and this year Covid-19 should put paid to that. We don’t want that visit.
   I’m not saying I can practically taste the vaccine. But anticipation is in the air. Every visit by every healthcare worker is a risk. Those visits were scaled back, and there’s a surprising amount of work done over the telephone. It isn’t the same, of course.
   Aside from memories of those who are gone, I am facing memories of routines that bit the dust. Daycare. Respite. Clinic visits. Shopping in town. It’s a strange time when your dream of a supermarket visit comes across as science fiction or fantasy.
   The last time I was inside an establishment was today, when I picked up pills from the pharmacy. Gloved and masked. The lone customer in the place. Staring at professional marking tape on the floor. Waiting for the pharmacist to do a bit of cleaning between clients. The only thing missing was a spacesuit.
   Memories of the pharmacy. You couldn’t swing a cliché in there. That’s how cramped it was. But I was the only customer. I waited a few minutes for masked guy to go in and come back out. There I was, standing in a queue of one.
   I dimly remember standing in snaking queues, waiting for pills. That is alien to me. It is easier to remember my mother’s laughter as she cracked a joke and almost tumbled into a ladder with my cousin.