When I come to Wollongong, the main priority is to see Mum but, more and more, Uncle Archie takes up the majority of my time. The last few times I’ve been here, Mum has not been very lucid and it’s hard to know what she understands and what she enjoys. If we take her out, we don’t know whether she is relishing the change of scene or is becoming anxious because she doesn’t recognize her surroundings and is frightened by the unusual noises. Uncle Archie is better able to say what he would like to do and is not shy about asking.
When I arrived yesterday I found the staff wheeling their residents out on to the sunny balcony. Uncle Archie was sitting in solitary splendour, soaking up the sun, so I popped along to see if Mum was up and about. Her door was closed which I took to be a sign that they were dressing her, so back to the balcony. It took Uncle Archie a while to recognize me or work out who I was. I thought it might be the sun behind me which was confusing him but later on I started to think that his memory was failing.
While I was talking to him, the staff brought Mum out with the others. She seems to spend all her time in a bed-chair at the moment and I can’t help thinking of a time five or six years ago, before she was admitted to a nursing home, when she asked me to take her to a place in Wollongong which she thought might offer her a place. The person-in-charge said that it was not the sort of place Mum would need but Mum insisted on having a look anyway (I think she had helped raise some funds for the facility so felt a connection).
Oh dear, it was tragic. All the old ladies (very few men) were in these bed-chairs, wizened and toothless. Certainly, waiting for God! Mum was shocked, I know. Even though she knew, intellectually, that growing old was not always a pleasant journey, the reality was a lot more challenging than she had imagined. She couldn’t wait to get out of the place. ‘If I get like that,’ she said, ’Just shoot me.” That might have been her macabre Scottish humour talking but there has to be an element of truth under the surface. And we’re helpless to do anything about it.
Now I see her, my strong, competent Mum, lying under a blanket, singing nonsense words to the old tunes she learned as a child, like Westering Ho, or I Know a Lassie, or sleeping with her mouth open. All her dignity has gone with her memory and there’s little left of the woman who left her family in Scotland and travelled to the ends of the earth to give her sons a better chance in life. She’s taken nothing from the earth and left negligible footprints but her reward is to fade away by degrees until she is just a shell, while her family watch the deterioration. It’s not a nice way to live, or die.
When I arrived yesterday I found the staff wheeling their residents out on to the sunny balcony. Uncle Archie was sitting in solitary splendour, soaking up the sun, so I popped along to see if Mum was up and about. Her door was closed which I took to be a sign that they were dressing her, so back to the balcony. It took Uncle Archie a while to recognize me or work out who I was. I thought it might be the sun behind me which was confusing him but later on I started to think that his memory was failing.
While I was talking to him, the staff brought Mum out with the others. She seems to spend all her time in a bed-chair at the moment and I can’t help thinking of a time five or six years ago, before she was admitted to a nursing home, when she asked me to take her to a place in Wollongong which she thought might offer her a place. The person-in-charge said that it was not the sort of place Mum would need but Mum insisted on having a look anyway (I think she had helped raise some funds for the facility so felt a connection).
Oh dear, it was tragic. All the old ladies (very few men) were in these bed-chairs, wizened and toothless. Certainly, waiting for God! Mum was shocked, I know. Even though she knew, intellectually, that growing old was not always a pleasant journey, the reality was a lot more challenging than she had imagined. She couldn’t wait to get out of the place. ‘If I get like that,’ she said, ’Just shoot me.” That might have been her macabre Scottish humour talking but there has to be an element of truth under the surface. And we’re helpless to do anything about it.
Now I see her, my strong, competent Mum, lying under a blanket, singing nonsense words to the old tunes she learned as a child, like Westering Ho, or I Know a Lassie, or sleeping with her mouth open. All her dignity has gone with her memory and there’s little left of the woman who left her family in Scotland and travelled to the ends of the earth to give her sons a better chance in life. She’s taken nothing from the earth and left negligible footprints but her reward is to fade away by degrees until she is just a shell, while her family watch the deterioration. It’s not a nice way to live, or die.
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