Hymn

Home is where...

“Hello?”  No reply but then she is deaf.  The sheltered flat looks great.  It’s much better than I imagined it.  It has her furniture around the place and her pictures on the walls.  Quite homely even.  But she wasn’t there.  We found her on another floor, opening random doors and utterly lost.  Happy Mothers Day, Nana.

Wake up

Last night I dreamt that Grandad hadn't died six years ago: he'd just been travelling.  He'd come home in his old Hillman Avenger to collect Nan.  He looked so well, and reunited with Her Love she was so happy - she was even learning to drive.  They could go home together.  We wouldn't need to strip and sell the place after all and Nana wouldn't need to go into a soulless care facility and wait to die. 

Then I woke up.

Broken

We met Social Services again today to see what happens next to Gran.  After a discussion to which Nana’s contribution was “I wish the Lord would take me” I realised how utterly bereft of hope her life had become.  Miserable beyond belief, unable to read through poor glasses (even if she had the inclination), surrounded by women like her rendered mute by deafness, her body shutting down from a life of stubborn hard work.

Two faced

Gran saw me enter the ward and smiled.  As she caught sight of Mum her face contorted into the miserable wizened mask she keeps for show.  In a moment the positive frustration of being bored by the hospital disappeared and was replaced by the crushingly familiar whinging.  I reassured Mum that with her, Gran could relax enough to be honest.  In my heart it felt like the old woman’s most vicious kind of manipulation. 

Sheep in wolf's clothing

Tonight, with my Mum finally away convalescing and after lying in a ward for three days, Nana has become a gentle and frail old lady.  We talked about how her sister went deaf in one ear after contracting typhoid at the age of 21, about baby, about mum being poorly and unappreciated, about all sorts of stuff.  It was nice.

Pyrrhic victory

She finally managed to do it.  She got herself dressed (after a day of being too poorly) and, knowing Mum was out, pressed her alarm.  My Nana is in hospital.  Already the nurses have confessed to finding nothing wrong with her but her panting and unresponsiveness are enough to keep them checking.  I wonder if Nana knows she’s left home for good?

Get Up

Nana has pressed her alarm button every day this week.  Sometimes more than once.  Always with a different complaint: feeling sick, can’t breath, pain here or there.  Every time the same response from the Emergency Doctor or Paramedics: there’s nothing untoward for a woman in nineties - on the contrary she’s remarkably healthy for her age.  Their shared and repeated diagnosis does no good.  Still she complains.  Today she was too weak to get up.  Too weak to eat.  Too weak to talk.  The Doctor summoned by my mum, summoned by the Home Help could find nothing wrong.  Again.  “But I want to go to hospital.”
‘But there’s nothing to warrant it.’ 
“But I want to go to hospital.”
Slowly the outsiders inevitably must abandon my mum to her fate.  All day she climbs the stairs at her mother’s beck and call.  No longer too weak to talk.  Or eat. But much, much too weak to get up.
Exhausted, my mum leaves an hour before the Evening Help arrives.
By the time, the Help arrives, my Nana is in her dressing gown sitting watching television downstairs.

Woeful Oblivion

It was always a hopelessly brave decision by my Mum to have my Gran stay over Christmas.  Most of the time when she’s not complaining of feeling unwell or wishing she was dead, my Nana sleeps.  After the last few days of ceaseless complaining, she’s reduced my Mum to a sobbing wreck.  What’s unusually horrific though is my Gran’s seeming oblivion to her weeping daughter just a few feet away.  Even when the Emergency Doctor is there - called out needlessly again.  The insensitivity is utterly astonishing and completely demoralising.

Calculation

In my Nana’s ceaseless campaign to undermine my Mum’s independence and force her into a 24 hour live-in carer, she’s adopted a new tactic: her Alarm Button.  Pressing the alarm triggers a response from the care services - they call my Mum if they can’t get Nana to speak to them.  And she never does.  And with unshakeable logic, its highly probable that following a lonely one and a half mile walk after 9 o’clock at night, a guilt-ridden 60 year old woman is much more likely to stay.  If it wasn’t so wickedly manipulative, it would be an admirable plan by a frail 92 year old.