Feelings I don’t want to write about

I don’t want to write about this because I am ashamed. I feel a terrible, monstrous guilt, and I’m so busy judging myself that I can almost find no space in my heart to worry about how you might judge me. Almost. But what I’m about to tell you is pretty shocking. You might judge me. I wouldn’t entirely blame you if you did, because I’m certainly judging myself.

But it occurs to me that, although it feels incredibly lonely to me and my family as we go through this, this is actually not a rare story. So maybe there are other people out there feeling guilty, and ashamed, and believing they are utterly monstrous for feeling the way they do.

Maybe baring my soul will help them. Maybe it will help me. Maybe, even now, I’m putting off admitting the truth.

So here it is:

I wish my Mum would die.

Without context, those words are pretty shocking. I can’t quite believe I feel them, much less write them publicly like this. And I condemn myself, so strongly, for their callous truth.

But the truth is, we lost Mum years ago, and we haven’t the luxury of mourning her. Of accepting her passing, learning to live with our grief, and moving on. Because we are compelled to maintain the shattered shell of her brain, and her surprisingly robust body, regardless of how little of her remains inside it.

She doesn’t know her children. She certainly doesn’t know her grandchildren. And she is terrified of what is happening to her. She is unbearably confused and distressed. She wants to go home to her parents – perhaps to a time she felt safe – although even if they were alive she probably wouldn’t know them.

She used to have lucid moments, but I don’t think they happen anymore. She is easier to manage now as some of the rage and paranoia have eroded, along with the last of her personality. She used to remember – or create – fragments of her past, but even those are gone now.

And this is the best she will ever be from now on. Every day she will get worse. Every visit will be more traumatic. And we mourn her even as we keep her alive. We fight her to find ways to take care of her, and she resists them, every one, because it’s all so confusing and terrifying to her.

Every day another small window into ways that we can help her squeezes closed. Every moment she becomes more lost, more alone, less herself.

And all we can do is keep her alive. Even though she died so long ago.

I don’t want this to happen to me. I don’t want to put my children through it. I don’t want to go through it myself. Who benefits from dragging out her terror? From maintaining the trauma that is her – apparently – sacred life?

There is nothing sacred about the rigid enforcement of laws that promote infinite pain and endless sorrow. This is not about the value of life. This is callous, unfeeling, and fiendishly cruel.

We talk about quality of life as though it is something we have control over, but there comes a point where quality of life goes irretrievably negative. Where maintaining this life is no longer the ethical thing to do. Where keeping someone alive is simply torture.

Who benefits from this hell Mum is going through?

Making sense of dementia

I hope you didn’t read the title expecting a solution. Because we are not in a solvable state. Dissolving maybe, but not solvable.

How do you make sense of dementia? How can you explain to someone the profound desolation when your own mother doesn’t know who you are? When she asks you whether she knew your Mum?

How can you possibly convey the heartbreaking trauma of having your 78 year old Mum begging to go home to her Mum and Dad? The Mum and Dad who died 45 and 30 years ago. Of knowing she is ill but being unable to get her to see a doctor?

How can you explain the soul shredding mundanity and frustration of the sheer volume of paperwork and complexity around a million little things like not being able to get her gas meter read, because she doesn’t hear the doorbell and is utterly paranoid about locking the gate?

It’s impossible to describe how agitated she gets when we try to fix something around her house. How difficult it is to do simple hardware jobs when she is overflowing with anxiety about what it means, how it happened, and whether she is going to get into trouble. And hovering over you begging to go home to her Mum and Dad.

I’ve heard people say it’s like caring for a child – that the positions are reversed and the children become the parents. But that’s far too simple. Far too benign. Because children learn. Children have hope. You can explain things to a child. At the very least, children can understand when they have gone too far.

Children grow and progress, but dementia is taking my Mum inexorably down. I lost her years ago, but there has been no funeral. No wake. No flowers. And every time I visit I lose her again. When Dad had cancer I was waiting for the phone call that would tell me he was gone. Now I wait for the next crack in the increasingly empty shell of my mother’s brain.

Imagine not being able to continue, but getting up every day and doing it again.  Imagine a soul as lost and helpless as a child, but as strong and angry as an adult. Imagine losing your mother over and over again. Imagine a death that takes a decade.