When you have a kid for the first time, you look down at them and you wonder. What the hell am I doing? What AM I doing? Some days it feels like everyone has an opinion and everyone’s opinion is that you are doing it wrong.
And yet you stumble blindly on.
What choice do you have? You brought life into the world and you are responsible for it, and one day that life will be responsible for you.
Nobody really talks about elder care.
Most of us are going to have to do it. Going to have to face it. Not all of us have children, but all of us have parents. And they are going to get old.
And then they are going to die.
No, no – don’t worry. Nothing so dramatic. No need for sympathy emotes and condolences.
Not yet.
You see, the secret, the one nobody talks about, is that it takes quite a while coming to terms with it. The idea that death is stalking them, polishing up his scythe. For so much of your life they were there – the people you ran to to show that art you had done, who bandaged your knee when you cut yourself digging up the parquet flooring, the ones you introduced The One to, and who nursed you through the heartbreak later.
But as you grow your parents shrink.
They felt so large when you were so tiny, these huge lumbering giants, these boundless reservoirs of love and understanding. And every day they died a little. Suddenly you are too big for that piggyback, or you find yourself disagreeing with their views. Asserting your independence, your autonomy. Maybe they struggled with that.
Maybe they struggled with a lot of things.
I hear things. My generation are frequently shitty parents. Selfish. We were promised a life of carefree studenthood with no responsibility, like the Eighties never ended. And one day? We’ll be in OUR Eighties, and there won’t be so much dayglo and hammer pants. And the end will come whether we want it to or not.
My mum is ninety seven. A little over a week from now she will be 98.
People used to say, oh you’ve had a good innings. Most people don’t get to keep their faculties, keep their health, keep solvent, keep their independence, live near their only child. My dad? Died ten years ago. Out like a light going for a paper. But he’d had friends who had died in a field in Normandy. He knew how lucky he was to have ninety years.
A sizeable chunk of my mother died that day too.
Grief changes us.
Age changes us.
Some days you just want to wake up three again, with no care in the world. The angelic picture of that angelic boy they still think you are. In their dreams. On their mantelpiece. Watching you. Mocking you for every misstep.
The reality is different.
I’ve often wondered these past few years if our twilight years are some kind of defence mechanism. The battle between constantly pushing us away, and wanting to draw us ever closer. Grooming us to accept death.
We’d fight.
As we get older our bodies start to give out. Most of us don’t get to 98 with everything still working the way we would like. Our brains stop working the way we would like. For a while my mother has been pretty profoundly deaf. But her brain is working overtime to join the dots. It’s just not very good at it.
Once I remember telling her I’d pop down the shops. She gets all angry with me.
“I thought I brought you up better than that!” she barks. “Oh son, I am appalled...”
And I’m like, what?
“How could you!”
I’m still a bit confused here.
“How could you join the Ku Klux Klan!”
...
Pretty certain that’s not what I said mum. In what reality would that be what I said? Theres not even a chapter in the UK, IF that was something I would ever consider doing, which I think we both know is absolutely not the case. Is that what you imagine I would say in any reality? I mean, it’s funny in a way isn’t it? The weird little connections our brains make. Except hers raced to put me in a white sheet at a cross burning.
Is that what a part of her thinks of me?
Maybe all our parents secretly think we are failures. When I held my children in my arms for the first time I imagined nothing more than the fact that I would love them whoever they were and whatever they did. Unconditionally. But maybe that is just the set up for a cosmic punchline further down the road?
I know that I was a disappointment to my mother. She had planned my career path out at an early age. I would be a priest, do missionary work in Africa, marry an African. Gaming was just this fad I was into that ruined my schoolwork.
And my degree.
(Turned out OK in the end though, right?)
I had a choice. Go home, get a job in some activity that would punish me, or become a slacker and stay away. I chose to stay away.
My mother had plenty of other kids, students who had come to the church, people we adopted. She had a huge extended virtual family of people who loved God more than I did. There was CND, Amnesty, Fair Trade, the church, the Rotary. The house was always full of posters and protestors. I was adopted, so my mum just seemed to carry on adopting loads of other people.
Just unofficially.
As we get older our opinions pickle. We get mentally less agile. The real world starts to move faster and faster, while our world gets slower and slower. The elderly? They are already in lockdown. I often say that depression is solipsistic. I sometimes wonder how much of the loneliness we see in old people is a result of late onset depression, as their world turns in?
When does this start to happen? Is it the piggyback? The disagreements? When you leave home? When you have a family of your own? Do they experience the chill of knowing? Will I one day?
“You have your new family to worry about. The wife and the kids. You shouldn’t have to worry about me” said my mother, meaning very much the opposite. Three years ago we moved her up to be close. Because at some point you just know. It doesn’t get better than this.
Because we don’t talk about it.
The year before I had spent two weeks back home, looking after her after a fall. She had deteriorated fast, faster than I thought possible. She was in hospital, there were hallucinations, delirium. Its surprisingly common in the elderly – they don’t drink enough, they fall easily prey to UTI’s, they get dizzy, they fall, in hospital they catch the bugs zinging around and that’s it. We just don’t talk about it.
Enough.
At all.
When you have a child you discover there is a lot we don’t talk about. The nurses are great, the midwives are great, but they do this a hundred times a day. You only get to do it once or twice. Nobody has prepared you for it, and here you are, often alone, desperate for that hand to hold and yet that hand is emaciated, with a hospital tag, attached to a drip.
Look, my parents were old when they adopted me. They were the oldest parents of any of the kids in my class. Everyone would pile round to my house in primary school because my mum had lived through rationing and always wanted the house full of food. During the war my dad had trained the Free Poles to parachute before flying into occupied France ahead of D-Day and spending three days in a foxhole overlooking Pegasus Bridge.
My dad was a quiet man. He knew who he was and where he was. He had been a regimental sergeant major, but now he could sit and read the paper in peace while my mum did the talking for everybody. On Sundays we would yomp all over the hills with a train of neighbourhood kids. The only time my parents were apart was a three week fact finding tour to Guatemala for Amnesty.
My mum had been firing an Ack Ack gun at German aircraft from across the Channel during the war. Then she went back to look after her mum, because her sister Betty had left for China. My aunt. She was a missionary during the Long March, and later in Ghana. That’s our African connection. My mum worked for the same guy on the same wage for twenty years, and kept house. Then my dad came along.
Out like a light.
My mum had a premonition, at the exact moment he died. Or I should say, the exact moment his spirit left his body. His dying thoughts were of her, of her safety. And that’s where his spirit went. He never regained consciousness, because there was no consciousness left.
Maybe it is better that way.
Because otherwise you live to see the slow degradation of consciousness. Like a chemistry experiment at school, where you constantly boil and bubble away alcohol until all that is left is the impurity.
Soul grit.
If you have ever nursed an elderly relative you’ll know what I mean. The people who love us the most are the ones who know how to hurt us the most. As the rest of them – what made them them – is packing its bags and getting ready to leave, the soul grit knows it’s going nowhere.
And it lashes out.
Some days my mother is convinced my marriage is failing. I can understand the appeal. Then it would be me and her, like the old days. She loves my wife and the kids, but part of her is jealous. The soul grit.
Irrational.
Human.
There are of course the constant professions and protestations of love. The need for constant reciprocity. The phone calls. You know like when you are in love and you keep ringing each other to profess your love and you are like, you hang up... no you hang up. That’s my mum. My mum is like my first desperately needy girlfriend.
Soul grit. And more than a bit of Freud.
We talked multiple times every day during the first lockdown. We would visit and wave through the window. But the two biggest killers of the elderly are isolation and dehydration. And you can’t be there to make them tea or do the crossword. That’s what three months of lockdown did – exposed the elderly to the two biggest killers to save them from the third.
I’m lucky. She is round the corner, five minutes away. She complains all the time that it’s not close enough. Five minutes by car. Twenty minutes walk. I used to do it every day.
“You said five minutes. And you’ve been twenty minutes”
“Five minutes by car, mum.”
But now I’m a liar. I got her here under false pretences. She was happy back home, and now she is isolated in a city she doesn’t know. She’s 97. She never leaves her flat. Imagine trying to run end of life support remotely? We get to be five minutes away, not five hours. No sitting on a train while you fret about not being there.
Being a bad son.
My guilt is weaponised by soul grit mother.
I’m fat. She doesn’t like it. I’m late. She doesn’t like it. I have commitments – to my business, to my family. She doesn’t like it. Sometimes she accepts it, like I have to do these things. But as she got older she turned more inward. People she has known for years, who love her like a mother? Cut off. Isolated. She constantly wants to pull me closer while driving everyone else away.
Between lockdowns we registered to be my mum’s carers. We could now visit her as her support bubble. Make sure she ate. Make sure she drank fluids. After the three months of the first lockdown she had deteriorated quite badly. She’s now profoundly deaf, almost blind with inoperable macular degeneration. She can’t do the Guardian crossword, or watch the snooker. She struggles to hear people on the phone.
It doesn’t stop her ringing them or making up what they said.
She’ll wake at all hours of the day and night. It’s like a factory reset has been pushed. She rings, complaining that she hasn’t seen anyone for days, hasn’t eaten for days.
In what reality would we do that? Would I do that? The reality her brain rushes to. Bad reality where I joined the Ku Klux Klan and we are starving her.
She longs for death. Sometimes she mutters it under her breath. Despite the COVID epidemic she has suddenly come over all handsy. She wants to hold my hand. She wants a hug. Wants a kiss. She’s like a lecherous uncle in a bad repertory farce. It’s a pandemic mum. We’re not wearing the masks to hurt you. We’re not practicing good COVID security to punish you.
You might crave death but you don’t want this one.
Were we at work? No, it’s a lockdown. We go nowhere. We do nothing, except come and look after you. Are the kids at school? Still a lockdown. How’s the shop doing? In lockdown.
When I was a kid my mum would pile every plate high to the ginnels and then slide half her dinner onto mine. A lot of folks who lived through rationing were like that. They fed up their kids like prize hogs. I was reminded every day of the starving people in Africa.
Now she eats as little as she can. Like if she starves herself she will become so light she will float away to heaven without having to go through the dying part. But it just doesn’t work like that.
Only it does, if you don’t eat and you don’t drink.
Depression stops you taking care of yourself too. There have been whole swathes of time I haven’t washed or got dressed. I don’t realise it at the time because my brain has turned off those higher order functions to concentrate on worry. That’s another thing my mother does. She worries.
Worries she has accused offence. Worried she is going to be left, abandoned. Worried about the kids. Forty years ago she worried about not having enough food on the table, or the starving millions or the threat of thermonuclear war.
I learned my own anxiety bouncing on her knee. I didn’t realise it then, until the rest of her boiled away.
Why can’t she worry about not drinking enough? Why can’t she worry about the things that are real? That are now? Why can’t she worry about offending the care staff who she accuses of all manner of things? This isn’t her – my ‘love in her heart for every human’ mother. Why can’t she care about all the students she adopted, who were often better children than I was?
Why does it all fall on me?
My partner looked up end of life care, hoping to finds some advice. What is normal? Once you take away the hospices and the illnesses and the hospitals, what does normal look like? Nobody seems to know.
Gethsemane waits for all of us.
Some of you have passed through its gates already. Others have had such bad parenting you are making your own way. I won’t judge you. This thing we don’t talk about? We probably don’t want to face it because deep down we know that one day it will be us. All marriages end in death or divorce.
The bright and bubbly facets of our personality evaporating away. The soul grit remaining. There’s a lot of sleeping. A lot of garbled phone calls. A lot of requests for small portions. Time ceased to have meaning. Three hours is no time at all, but five minutes can be an eternity.
And the clock ticks ever down.
I’ve been a carer now for about six months. And we just don’t talk about it enough.
Maybe we should.
