Memory and Memories

Memory and Memories

A few summers ago, you accepted to leave father with your son in law and to take a break for the day. Our one special day together, travelling to Spain through the mountains, sharing a paella, buying honey and cigarettes, all vanished within a year. This is how I knew something was wrong, when I mentioned the day in passing and you had no recollection of it whatsoever.

Now you rub my arm affectionately and tell me how lucky you are to have a pearl of a daughter.

When I came to visit last, you asked what time I would arrive at the bus stop and cheerfully announced you would come and wait for me, as if you were talking to your teenage girlfriend. When I arrived and, unsurprisingly, made my way to you on my own, you had left a half-eaten pot of yogurt in the oven. You had also left a precious souvenir on display on the dresser: a never seen before very old and pretty post card sent to you by your dad all the way from WWII, calling you his cherished dolly when you were only five.

You regularly forget to put on your dentures or brush your hair and yet, you rail against this stubborn hair that grows right above the left corner of your upper lip. I supply the magnifying mirror and the tweezers but you cannot manage it, so I pull out the offender. Watching your reflection, you notice the threadlike irregular white line across your wrinkled upper lip and you are curious to know what happened. In the split second it takes me to figure out an answer, you have switched to a different topic and I am relieved to be off the hook. I was four when you explained in words muffled by pain and a big white bandage that you should not have horsed around on the stairs with dad.

Dementia begets madness in me too. Trying to reason with you and being met with a wall of stubbornness enrages me and I lose my temper. I shout at you, I am hopping mad because you insist in using a last century filthy piss pot instead of walking to the toilet less than five steps away from your bed.

I am also learning to just agree rather than contradict all the time. You outlandishly announce that you will visit me in Ireland next Christmas. When you were well, you could not come because father needed you and you did not want to leave him on his own. In the ten years since his accident, you made it once only, for your granddaughter’s wedding. After he passed away, you bravely travelled to us two or three times but it became impossible as you were too nervous, even though you were accompanied from door to door. Your last visit left a memorable impression. I brought you to mass as you wished, and when I drove to collect you, well before time, you were already standing outside the church, waiting for me, looking very sheepish. You had soiled yourself very badly.

A single pair of brown knickers (not their natural colour) is regularly exposed, drying on the clothes horse like a prized piece of art at the entrance door for all to see. I take away all your knickers and replace them with disposable incontinence underwear. While I’m at it, I stealthily hide the chamber pot where you will never find it. Since then, you have never asked for those vintage companions, you do not miss them for a second. This is the way to go. You have made a cunning deceiver of me, using subterfuge behind your back.

Our lives have come full circle: you have become my two year old and you are as vulnerable as a toddler, one who can walk, talk, eat, get dressed and watch television. Like a child, didn’t you proudly show off that you remember your PIN number by shouting it out loud to me from the chair behind me, while I was paying with your card at the chemist’s!

There was a huge bruise on your left butt cheek the other day and you have no idea how it happened. You must have fallen, but by the same token, someone could have hit you and no one will ever know.

You start a packet of crisps, put it down, and soon enough, there are three bags of crisps on the go in different parts of the kitchen. I know all that because I watch you on the webcam app two thousand miles away. I guide you through breakfast every morning: ‘now go to the fridge behind you, now take out the milk, now pour it into your bowl’.

You, who wiped children’s bums for a living, who cared for your demented husband for years, listening to his cursing and ravings all day long, who put up with his abuse, his compulsive hoarding and self-neglect, now have a multitude of people at your service: food delivered daily, a helper at meals time, a physiotherapist, a nurse, a cleaner, a carer for washing, and me to orchestrate it all. And yet you constantly tell these people not to bother, that you will do it all later. I am sad you cannot appreciate those luxuries to bask in them. You live in a gated community for the elderly and you even have an events lady. She organises games and activities, she brings you and a small group of fellow seniors in a mini bus to visit museums, to the restaurant, to the cinema. That one time I dragged you to the cinema as a teenager to see Gone with the wind, we had to cut it short because you were worried we would not make it home on time for father’s dinner.

Everything happens in the present for you. You go through each moment with no parasite thoughts or worries, in the now. No point in asking an hour later, if an outing by the lake was pleasant; you will answer that you just rode around on a bus. Thankfully, the photos on WhatsApp say otherwise.

These helpers and carers synchronise and communicate, with your welfare in mind, but they do not all get along. Some bitch and criticise each other and would like me to arbitrate. I am the soothing voice of diplomacy in the distance. I need them all and they all do a wonderful job, most of them for a minimum wage and their services certainly beat leaving you to rot in a nursing home.

Your closest neighbours bring back faith in humanity. They call in regularly, have a, mostly, one sided chat, bring you freshly made pancakes or the cherries they just picked from their daughter’s orchard.

You also visit another friend, a little older than you, who has all her wits but can hardly walk. She has stopped coming over to you but you tell everyone that you visit each other regularly. You used to go together to the local restaurant nearby when you first moved to the neighbourhood but she got tired of the same menu, or so she claims. I cannot help suspecting that what she really got tired of was your far too frequent gushing at how the two of you reacquainted half a century later. You keep bringing up the holidays in Spain where you happened to meet through mutual friends.

I love repeating good news to you: each time, it’s like pressing the “refresh” button on a pleasant surprise! On the other hand, I hate watching you wandering around your apartment, stopping here and there as if on a discovery trail, muttering ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I forget’ to yourself. I also dislike some of your morning greetings from a distance: ‘Where am I?’, ‘Where are you?’, and ‘What do I do now?’

You answer ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I don’t remember’ calmly like a mantra to most questions. When I visit, we talk about the past and resurrect all the family members who were close to us. I have become your memory and the word “remind” takes on its full meaning as I jump start a collection of bygone stories. You bring up people and ask what has become of them and invariably I have to answer they have passed but you never get upset.

You grew up in the country and every now and then, you come out with sentences in the dialect of your childhood.

You never have a bad word about anyone, unlike father, who had a nasty comment on most people, even presenters on the telly! If you bring him up, you ask me questions, as if you were quizzing me and checking the answer. I cannot lie and he never comes out rosy from my lips. You just chuckle as if you find it amusing and it infuriates me. ‘Oh yes, that’s true, he did not pay you any attention as a child!’, ‘That’s right, he did not want you and you stayed with your grandparents for eight years!’, ‘Indeed, he was very strict when you came to live with us’

Today, I am driving you back to the remote village in the mountains where you were sequestered for twenty five years. You like to visit the grave where father is buried. He loved the peace, the seclusion even, of the place which became your holiday home, but it was not your choice to retire to a green prison, as you used to call it. A few hippies wishing to return to Mother Nature revelled in its isolated spots going barefoot with no electricity. The network of caves underground was a delight for potholers who could explore the countless subterranean depths. It also appealed to hikers, fishermen and nature lovers. Even the odd weed growers could pursue their “gardening” unheeded under open skies. You however were well aware that you would one day need to escape from the daily routine of crosswords, knitting by the fire or striding up and down the hilly countryside, if only to do some shopping in the nearest town twenty kilometres away without depending on father for a lift. So, while still living in the city, you anticipated and decided to get your driving licence. At 58, it was no mean feat and it took two years and five attempts to pass the driving test, in secret, because you knew father would disapprove. However, once retired to the green prison, you needed to use the small second car he drove for small journeys. You did not even dream of driving the bigger car, even though you and father were sharing the expenses for both. To be fair, father did not refuse but he did set you a test of his own: if you were able to manoeuvre the small car out of the tight area it was parked in, reverse through the narrow pillars of the open gate and out onto the road with poor visibility, the world was your oyster! The icing on the cake of the driving challenge was that the small car was a Citroen 2CV whose gear stick is notoriously different from most other cars, certainly different from the car you had learnt to drive with the school of motoring. After a few minutes of struggling on all fronts, you conceded that your ambitious project, the painful hundreds of hours of driving lessons, the huge expense, and the whole foresight of preparing for a bit of independence had all been for nothing. The insecure, diffident defeatist in you rallied to father’s conviction that you were not capable and you abandoned the idea. Now, in your dotage, from the back of the car where you are tensely holding on to the handle above the door, you bring up proudly that you passed your driving licence but you check obsessively throughout the whole journey whether I can drive the car, unflatteringly letting out uncontrolled yelps of dread at every bend.

You sit on the black marble grave, quiet and emotionless. You have forgotten the misery and the hardship of the slow descent into decrepitude that was the end of his life. A few years ago, the burden of pain, ill health and anguish that doctors could not cure prompted you and father to consult a faith healer. The man declared there was nothing he could do for either of you; that your fate was to look after your husband to the end. You did and now my solace for you is that it is all erased. He also said to father that he was paying for his transgressions and that he knew what they were. I think I do too, at least as far as I am concerned.