Family Affairs

I promised I’d update my Canadian family on how our Grandmother is doing.  My parents had to move her into a home last week and my brother and I went to see her this weekend.  She’s settling in pretty well, all things considered.  The home is lovely.  More like a hotel.  The staff all seemed very sweet and caring.

She definitely needed to be moved into somewhere that looked after her all the time.   She was becoming a danger to herself – she kept wandering off in the night.  Looking for children mostly and on her return she’d say she was exhausted either after a fight in the town or because she had a bump on her head from either having been sailing or horse riding.  We were all assuming she was making it up – but maybe she really was taking herself off on little midnight jaunts across the seas and the countryside. What a lovely idea.

We had coffee in the dining room all together and whilst she’s a brave, strong, frankly amazing old bird of 96, she rolls through a stream of consciousness rather like different stills of a film – each a 2 second cameo shot, before moving on to the next thing.  She says something lucid, something important, swiftly follows it with a banal comment and then goes back to the beginning. She announced almost immediately that whilst she quite liked the place she was ready to leave:-

“I don’t know why you think I’d want to stay here.  Everybody is half dead.  I had to sit with this really boring 100 year old who had a napkin stuck to face this morning at breakfast.  I can’t even go and make a cup of tea.  What’s that on the table? What’s he doing here?   When am I going home?  Why have you come on your own, where’s your new wife?  I tried to wake all those half dead people up but it didn’t work”.  Well if you haven’t got a wife anymore then it’s much better to get rid of anybody you weren’t sure about as early as possible to avoid all the hassle.  There’s nothing to do here, so I’m growing a beard.  If I’d known you were coming I’d have saved you the journey.  At breakfast time I had to sit with this awful 100 year old woman who had a napkin stuck to her face.  Have I got a hair on my chin?  When can I leave?  What’s that plant called?  At breakfast time I had to sit opposite a really old lady – must have been 100 with a napkin stuck to her face.  I’m not doing that again.  How long do I have to stay here?

And so on.

It’s sad to watch a brain diminish and to be taken right back to the beginning.  It’s like watching the brain of a 3 year old work.  All over the place, skipping about from one thing to the next,  with little control. Maybe it’s not a bad way to sign out of life.  Slowly with just enough marbles to cope, but with not quite enough to give a shit.