On the
surface, the above sounds downright nasty. Didn’t I like my mother?
Why
would I feel relief at her passing away?
As
anyone who has lost their nearest and dearest to the steady onslaught of dementia
will know, it is a vicious disease. It can be ferociously rapid when overtaking
a person and their personality, or just a slow, horrible decline.
When it
finally dawned on me that my mother was seriously losing her mind to dementia
in 2010, after a number of years with ailing mental health, I had no idea what a
long journey of the soul me and my dad were entering, each in our different way.
My mother, on the other hand, was of course oblivious to the mists swirling in
her mind, making her think I was her favourite cousin (after said cousin passed
away), or a perfect stranger. As the years passed, the times when she knew who
I was when I visited became fewer and further between.
With the
exception of a few months in the early 1990s and again in 2010, when mum’s dementia
set in, I have lived abroad since my late teens, visiting my native Sweden a few
times a year. Mum used to always look forward to these visits with great
fervour, and despite dementia this didn’t really change. Living in care, she would, at least initially,
be able to recognise me when talking on the phone and when I told her of an
upcoming visit, she’d be happy as Larry at the thought of seeing me.
I cannot
begin to explain how it tortured me, when I would arrive only to realise she
didn’t know who I was when I was there in person. I would spend a whole week in
Sweden, visiting her as often as I could, only to find that she didn’t know I
was her daughter. Then, back home in London we’d talk on the phone, she would
know who I was and ask me, “When? When are you visiting? When are you coming to
see me? I can’t wait to see you!”.
The
thought that she was there, forever waiting for me, with the two of us never quite
able to “reach each other”, often brought on a sadness I have never felt before
or since.
That
said, mum’s life was hardly sad to her
and after years of negativity and depression, dementia often made her come
across as far happier than she’d been before. All her troubles were gone and
she was like a small child again with no responsibilities and very fleeting
worries. She didn’t mind not knowing who
I was, she just enjoyed my company regardless. But she wasn’t the woman I used
to know and I often missed the connection we had before illness put a stop to
it. As though sensing something wasn’t quite right, even though she liked the care
home, she would try to follow me when I was leaving. So many times I had
to leave her there behind closed gates (the “patients” weren’t allowed out alone,
of course), making up lies and explanations as to why she couldn’t come with
me. I think those images will always be etched in my mind – my mother standing
there, alone, confused and me walking away as firmly and quickly as I could.
Running from her, running from that feeling of loss, confusion, and helplessness.
My
mother was ill for over six years before she passed away. The last few weeks of
her life, she was bedridden after a difficult hip operation. I sat by her
bedside, fearing, not that she would die, but that she would have to live on.
Long years of nothingness, with her unable to do the few things that still
brought joy to her life. When she passed away, five days before her 90th
birthday, the relief was immense. So immense, in fact, that I organised the
funeral, stayed around to help dad for a while, did all the banking, admin and
aftermath of death, hardly shedding a tear. ‘I’ve done my grieving,’ I thought,
‘for years I’ve done my grieving and now I can let go.’ And I did. Or so I
thought.
I
really, truly felt that I had “done my time”, but grief is a “funny” thing.
What I didn’t understand back then, was that I had essentially been grieving
for the woman who was ill, but not for the woman who is dead.
Dementia
took over mum’s person and seeing that process over the years, was a constant
source of pain to those watching it. When mum died, in many ways I felt as
though I’d lost her years ago, even though she was still alive back then.
Only now,
several years after her passing, am I starting to be able to shift the
focus from her illness and the person she became, to the person she was before
dementia; the person who knew me and loved me and was always there for me,
despite all my crazy stunts and sometimes extremely ill-conceived choices.
Grief
isn’t necessarily something one “lets go of”, as was my foolhardy hope when mum
died. It morphs, it meanders, it finds a different expression when it needs to
be expressed. It becomes part of you and there are unexpected moments of sadness
that crop up, out of the blue, just like that. You make room for grief when you
can, you ask it to kindly leave you alone, if it’s too inconvenient a time.
As I
hold my very first published work of fiction in my hands, I remember telling
mum, who loved reading everything from poetry to prose and was a good writer in
her own way, about my travel writing - features and guidebooks that I was rather proud of at the time. She smiled and replied, “so when are you going to
become a real writer?”
Well
mum, it looks like maybe I am becoming “ a real writer” at long last.