My Dad and Dementia

Hold your memories close to your heart
For dementia will rip them apart
Tattered shreds haunt your mind
Broken threads hard to find
Shattered images fade, then depart...

I realise I haven’t written about my dad lately… He’s still with us in body if not always in mind, but it gets harder to see the tiny little differences in him every time I visit him in the care home where he now lives permanently. It’s as if he is slowly withdrawing from the world, day by day.

My dad will be 87 next month, but has had vascular dementia since he was 80, so over the last seven years the dad I knew and loved so much has slowly been disintegrating mentally in front of our eyes, piece by piece, memory by memory, which is just heartbreaking to experience.

In the last decade dad has had five strokes, each one leaving him with even more reduced mobility than before, and since the last small stroke just before Christmas last year he no longer has much speech. He whispers a soft ‘yes’ or ‘no’ when asked a direct question but not much else, so it’s difficult to know where he is in his mind any more, because he can’t tell us what he’s thinking or where he’s at, neither in time nor place.

In the past, sometimes dad would know I was his daughter, or at other times he would think I was his sister but as long as I knew where he was in his mind on that day, we could usually have a reasonable conversation regardless. And now I simply sit with him and hold his hand, talk a bit about life a bit, then go home and cry…

One of our neighbours, a sprightly 83 year old man who reminded me a lot of my dad as he used to be, died suddenly a couple of weeks ago. He had one massive stroke one day and was gone, just like that. It’s strange not seeing him around, but it’s made me think a lot about dad and his drastically reduced quality of life, and it hurts to remember that’s always how dad said he wanted to go – at home one minute, living a normal full life as usual, and then just gone…

Fandango’s Provocative Question this week asks simply – How are you? And I realise I am grieving for someone who is still alive, but not really living any more. Grieving for the loss of connection, and the closeness we always had, and the beauty of wholly belonging in someone’s heart without question.

Because now the question is, does dad even know who I am any more? Does he recognise me as his daughter, or does he still think I’m his sister, or is the occasional look of recognition he gives me just a vague familiar feeling that this is someone that I should know?

I still love my dad so very much and always will, but it saddens me so much to see him this way. The physical lack of mobility after the strokes I could cope with, but the mental deterioration of vascular dementia has so cruelly taken my beloved dad away from me, from all of us, and that reality makes me fiercely determined to live life while I can.

So don’t waste any more time procrastinating if there are important things you want to do before you die, because you never know what cruel twist of fate is waiting round the corner for you…

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Conjuring Up the Past

When I saw the Word of the Day today was ‘balsam’ I immediately thought of Alberto Balsam shampoo, which I used to use years ago. I looked it up on Google to check if you can still get it and yes, apparently it’s still widely available here in the UK.

One of the ‘flavours’ available is green apple, and that reminded me of the Woodleigh Green Apple shampoo I used in the late seventies – it truly had a strong green apple fragrance, and left my greasy teenage hair feeling so soft and smooth. I looked that up too, but no, sadly it seems it’s no longer around.

But then I got to thinking about Norsca anti-perspirant with its forest fresh pine fragrance, which I also loved at the time – that too feels very seventies, and I haven’t seen it for years although there does seem to be some rather more masculine version still available online?

So that was me in my early to mid teenage years, smelling regularly of green apples and forest fresh pines. And now? Well, today I used Palmers coconut-scented shampoo, and a Sure spring-bouquet-scented anti-perspirant, but I find I tend to chop and change these all the time.

Isn’t it funny how decades later the long-gone scent of something from the past can be conjured up so readily just by the name?

Fandango’s One Word Challenge: Name

Word of the Day: Balsam

Treasures and Pleasures

My favourite treasures are the fond memories stored in everyday things, often in the most innocuous of things.

For example, in my kitchen I have three old cut glass jugs. The largest is a beautiful water jug (for serving drinking water at the dining table) that once belonged to my grandmother, and the two small jugs I remember my mum using for serving pouring cream (or often just evaporated milk) to have with tinned fruit for ‘afters’. Even now the childhood memory of eating tinned sliced peaches with evaporated milk makes me smile from the heart.

Everyone seemed to use serving jugs for everything in my childhood, whereas nowadays I suppose we tend to serve cold liquids straight from the fridge in whatever container they come in. I only use mine on special occasions, when people come round or for a specific celebration – not to keep them for ‘best’ but simply to save on the washing up! But I do enjoy the memories they bring, and take great pleasure in handling the cool chunky glass I know so well.

In my cutlery drawer I have a selection of small silver spoons given to me by my mum – the dinky salt spoon that was sometimes used for mixing up powdered mustard in an egg cup, the short and stubby rounded caddy spoon for loose-leaf tea, and the squared-off sugar shovel that always lived in the sugar bowl. I have the old sugar tongs, too, used for sugar cubes when we were being posh, although I’ve never taken sugar in either my tea or coffee so both are a bit redundant in my house, but I love them nonetheless.

I also have some old spoons that once belonged to my grandmother before being passed on to my dad, and now to me, and these spoons have also been part of my life for nearly sixty years. There are four very used and abused dessert spoons with four matching teaspoons and one huge tablespoon. The tablespoon is the very one she used when she taught me to measure out the flour for making pancakes, and is the same spoon I used this afternoon when making pancakes myself, using her basic recipe from all those years ago. I really love the familiar worn, smooth feel of it in my hand, measuring out the correct weight of the flour ounce by ounce.

So I’m sitting here tonight eating freshly-made fluffy pancakes with my cup of tea, having used my grandmother’s old spoon to measure out the main ingredients of my grandmother’s old recipe, just the way she taught me all those years ago… I can almost hear her voice, smiling and satisfied. And to be honest I’m making sure I treasure my memories while I still can, because I know from my dad that the time may come when those precious memories may disintegrate into the depths of dementia, lost in limbo forever…

Weekly Prompt: Treasure

Kitchen Memories

Family memories seem to be order of the day today – the JusJoJan prompt word is Family and Amanda at Something to Ponder About asks us about memories of our grandparents, so it seems sensible to cover both at once…

My paternal grandparents lived on a coastal farm set high on the cliffs on the North-East coast of Scotland, just South of Aberdeen. It was mainly an arable farm but they kept a couple of cows for milk and chickens for eggs, and always kept a vegetable garden. The busy square-roomed farmhouse kitchen was large and multi-purposed, and as I picture it in my mind’s eye I see it from the simplistic perspective of childhood.

The door was in the top right hand corner, and on your right as you entered the kitchen was a huge carved wooden sideboard filled with boundless treasures, or so it seemed at the time. On the wall facing you was the fire – an old range when I was younger, later replaced with a ‘modern’ tiled fireplace as I grew older. In the right-hand corner corner was the hot water tank housed in a slatted-shelf airing cupboard, heated by the back boiler behind the fire. In front of the fire were the tired old armchairs where my grandparents sat in the evenings, although not so much during the day, constantly busy as they were. There was a small black and white TV tucked in to the left-hand corner, behind my grandmother’s chair, but I honestly don’t remember it being on much.

Along the left hand wall sat a solidly huge extending kitchen dining table, with heavy wooden carved legs and an almost-out-of-place cream formica-style top. I know it was an extending table because of the seams in the surface but I never saw it other than fully opened. There were mis-matched chairs pushed in all around the table, maybe nine in place constantly, but often seating twelve at a push. On the back wall was the big stone sink with draining board, a standard electric cooker, a small fridge and the kitchen ‘press’ – a 1950s-style larder cupboard with a hinged pull-down door creating an extra work surface as needed. Inside the press sat a large white enamel bread bin with blue trim.

The pantry was a separate deep-shelved small storage room off the hallway, and it was in this room external to the kitchen that the big, bulky pots and pans and suchlike were stored, and the milk-house (an outside stone-built cool-room close to the back door) was where meat and dairy were traditionally stored and where jams and jellies were cooled and set. I remember the old wooden butter churn being kept in the milk-house, but by the time I was born butter was regularly made using the much-prized electric bowl mixer that was stored in the pantry until needed. The milk was still left to settle on the marble work top of the milk-house, though, with the cream being skimmed off carefully as it separated.

So this was the big old kitchen in which I learned to cook – my mum has never enjoyed cooking, for her it was always a chore, but my paternal grandmother was a typical farmer’s wife and an excellent cook, and it was from her I learned to make the hearty soups and stews and everyday cakes and bakes that traditionally fed a farming family back in the day. My dad remembers his mum making oatcakes on the old range when he was a boy, but by the time the grandchildren came along oatcakes were generally bought in. Pancakes, however, were made almost daily, a staple sweet treat. Not thin crepes, but thick, fluffy Scotch pancakes, lined up in rows and cooled in a folded tea-towel before being transferred to the table.

One of my dad’s cousins regularly made a variety of cheeses, so oatcakes and home-made cheese (plus home-made butter) were the usual mid-meal snack eaten hungrily around the table, along with the home-made pancakes dripped with thick, sticky golden syrup. Meals I particularly remember eating there include boiled eggs in egg cups dipped with toast ‘soldiers’, mince and tatties and peas, smoked kippers, boiled crabs collected fresh from the fishermen, tasty cauliflower cheese with baked ham. Soup and pudding was a regular on the menu, too – a big bowl of thick soup with hunks of bread, followed by crumble and custard was a surprisingly filling meal without a ‘main’ course in between.

My dad was one of six children, so I grew up with myriad cousins and aunts and uncles and my grandparents’ farmhouse kitchen is the space where I picture us all in various combinations of family groupings at different times of the day and year, preparing meals, eating meals, and the inevitable clearing up afterwards. Another of dad’s cousins regularly avoided the washing up by always going to the toilet immediately after each meal, and always showing surprise on her return that the dishes had all been done already. This little trick was known within the family as ‘doing a (family member’s name)’ although we always had to remember not to say it when any of her immediate family were present!

I later realised as an adult just how hard a life it must have been for my grandmother, bringing up a large family as she did with minimal mod cons at the time, but for me as a child it was simply the perfect family environment, always warm and welcoming, always busy and bustling, always a place I loved to be. And I realise in my heart of hearts that’s the feeling I want people to get in my kitchen when they come to visit me. We don’t live in a farmhouse, or on a farm, but I try to make sure there’s still a warm welcome and wholesome, homely food on offer for all everyone we invite across our threshold… 🙂

Paradise Lost

There’s something about that song that always makes me think of being back there, in that particular time and place, driving around to find a quiet, private spot and parking up so particularly situated on the cusp of everything, ripe and ready for love. The spectacular sensation of surging hormones, heart beating hard and blood-flow burgeoning with typical teenage overkill. I remember the perfect potency of promise and feeling so powerfully alive at the burning urgency of it all…

Before the responsibility of pregnancy got in the way, before the adult realities of married life for two people so clearly unsuited and the sheer drudgery of perpetual poverty dragged me down and divorce divided us so definitively. Yet that song reminds me I was young and uncomplicated once, I yearned and loved and lusted freely along with the best of them. It reminds me with every note played and sentiment sung it is not our song, and never was; rather it is decidedly my song claimed in retrospect, long after you had left my life. Mine alone to carry with me always…

My female experience of paradise by the dashboard light ended not too much differently than Meatloaf’s testosterone-charged version, and all these decades later the thrumming rock music still brings back heated memories of my youthful desire and the oh-so-meaningful tongue-in-cheek lyrics still sear my sated soul, making me smile and shake my head at the fateful inevitability of it all.

I am growing old now and have moved on in life so far beyond every expectation. But watch me still play my song so unapologetically at teenage volume levels and you’ll see my eyes flash with the remembered brilliance of passion personified, the nascent climax of young love, a million sparkling fireworks exploding so suddenly across a long-lost landscape before fading away, limping so silently and softly into the scent-soiled night…

Fandango’s Story Starter

Not Thick, just Less Able…

When we were young judgemental kids growing up we were always cheerily quick to point out someone else’s inability to do or understand something we found relatively easy, and as kids do, we would scornfully label them as being ‘thick’.

Mum always remonstrated with us not to be so hurtful with regard to the inabilities of others, and that if someone was struggling with something it’s not nice to call them ‘thick’, as it’s not their fault they were simply ‘less able’ than others. We had it frequently drummed into us – it’s not ‘thick’, it’s ‘less able’…

So of course me and my sister and brother took this edict as gospel and ran with it in the extreme, having ‘less able’ soup with a ‘less able’ slice of bread and the like, driving mum nuts with our complete exclusion of the word ‘thick’ from our childhood vocabulary in all contexts, regardless…

Even now, in our late fifties, any one of us can still break into a childish grin with a wicked glint in our eye at the mere mention of ‘less able’ foodstuffs… 🙂

Stream of Consciousness Saturday: A phrase you grew up with

April A-Z: T is for Ticking

Ooh, but I do love a ticking clock – thankfully so does my husband! With individual smartphones taking over all things time-related these days it seems so many people don’t even have communal clock-face clocks in their homes any more, or if they do they prefer something battery operated, maybe even silent. We certainly have a couple of retro-style battery wall clocks ourselves – one in the kitchen and one in the dining room, and both of those have a pleasant quiet ticking sound. But I grew up with those old-fashioned proper clockwork clocks you had to wind up regularly, and personally I still love to hear a mechanically ticking clock.

We have an old Art Deco style mantel clock in the living room that you wind with a big brass key – we bought it second-hand in a charity shop – and it not only ticks loudly but it chimes, too, although the chime mechanism can be switched off (with a little lever) if you really don’t like it. My paternal grandparents had a huge mahogany grandfather clock in their hall with a really deep, resonant tick that seemed to be the heartbeat of the house. Maybe that’s why I find ticking clocks so reassuring, to me they’re the living heartbeat of the house, so I find the perpetual rhythm comforting… residual memories of being in the womb, perhaps?

Life events have conspired to pull me away from blogging over the last couple of months, and the idea of taking part in this year’s April Blogging from A-Z Challenge seems like a good way to try to get back into the habit of reading and posting regularly. Originally I thought of just using any old random words to go with the particular letter of the day, but realistically without a clear theme to work towards I’m not sure I’d be able to keep my focus for a full month… So instead I’ve opted for a relatively simple, if slightly self-indulgent work-around: This year I’ll be posting 26 things about me, nothing too taxing to write about yet still fulfilling the brief!

Too Pure to be Pink

Ah, how many times in my life have I watched Grease since first seeing it in 1978 at the Regal Cinema in Nairn, closed long ago? Every time the opening credits roll it takes me straight back to that place, to that time, to that teenage world of hopes and dreams.

It’s always been one of my favourite movies – I know it’s cheesy and ridiculously unbelievable but I remember so well being part of a group of giggly schoolgirls who took a bus together from the village where we lived through to the nearest town just to go to the cinema to see that particular movie, we had such a great time and I have such fun memories of it all, so for various reasons it always hold a special place in my heart.

Grease was on TV again today, so of course I had to watch it and sing along with every song as if I was 15 years old again… Back then everyone wanted to be Sandy, who was definitely too pure to be pink, but secretly I always felt drawn to Rizzo’s more rebellious nature…Quiet little people-pleasing me who would never say boo to a goose and would certainly never dream of rebelling against doing exactly what was expected of me – well at that stage in my life, anyway!

And now? Well perhaps at 15 I too might have been considered too pure to be pink, but by 18 I was pregnant and getting married (yes, in that order!) so maybe more of Rizzo rubbed off on me than I’d thought… 🙂

Limbo…

For the past five years my elderly dad, dealing desperately with the ongoing difficulties of vascular dementia, has experienced an ever-moving mix of three potential states of being – fully aware of existing in the here and now along with the rest of us, stuck happily in some time-warp parallel universe where for him the past is strangely superimposed onto the present, or suspended scarily in an unfathomable limbo…

When dad was first diagnosed with dementia, of course he was mainly present in the present but with the odd random serious lapse of memory that was certainly more than one step beyond common-or-garden forgetfulness. The first real sign of dad’s depth of confusion came a few days after he returned from his brother-in law’s funeral. Dad was chatting to us about people he’d seen there who he hadn’t seen for ages when he suddenly said – I think I’ll give Ian a call to see how he’s doing. We couldn’t get dad to understand that it had been Ian’s funeral he’d been at to see all those people from his past in the first place…

And then dad started doing the occasional odd thing in place of the everyday thing he’d been doing for years. Like when making a cup of tea, dad would have the cup sitting on the counter upside down but not understand why he couldn’t put anything in the cup. Or worse, he melted the plastic bottom of three electric kettles before we finally stopped him trying to do things in the kitchen. On two occasions dad had filled the kettle then sat it on the hob to boil – the acrid smell of melting plastic had brought my mum running. And on the third occasion dad filled the kettle, balanced it on top of the toaster, and switched the toaster on.

Dad’s dementia is the vascular type, brought on by several small strokes, so as well as cognitive difficulties dad also has worsening mobility issues. In the past he has forgotten how to walk when half way across a room, standing precariously, leaning on two walking sticks and unable to move further because he doesn’t know what to do next. He has forgotten where he was in the process of walking to the bathroom, confused and bewildered and agitated because he needed to go to the loo but couldn’t find his way through the family home he’d lived in for 40-odd years. And we soon found that when dad was in a more lucid frame of mind again, he consistently forgot that he had been unable to do these things. When he was lucid he wouldn’t believe that he’d been so incapacitated, in his mind he was still fine which was so frustrating for him.

It was almost more difficult in the early days when dad was far more aware of his surroundings and what was going on in his brain. In a sense it has become easier as the dementia progresses and dad is spending less and less time in the here and now. We get the occasional glimpse of grounded reality but on the whole these days much of dad’s day is spent reliving random memories of his past in real time, often including people and places long gone. Knowing his family history we can join him there, and have perfectly enjoyable conversations that leave dad feeling visibly content. The other day dad was convinced I was his sister Edith, not his daughter Ruth, so we were chatting happily about going to visit an uncle and aunt along the coast. Everyone dad mentioned has been dead for years but his memories are so real they carry him through.

At other times, though, dad seems to lose his visual and experiential link to the past, but at the same time cannot quite reconnect fully with the present. These are the days where dad just looks lost within himself. He’s neither here nor there, stuck in limbo, and you can see the confusion in his eyes, traced on his furrowed brow. His speech loses its clarity, slurring a little, and often the wrong words come out so communication loses its vibrancy and leaves dad feeling even more lost. He says sometimes he hears my voice and knows I am talking to him but cannot quite understand what I’m saying, everything just sounds jumbled in his head. He looks intently into my eyes trying to make sense of everything but then soon he looks away, despondent.

It’s a horrible situation for him to be in but in spite of all of this, on the whole I find dad is still very much dad. Somehow deep down he has retained some of his dry sense of humour, which always fills me with such an overwhelming feeling of warmth and love. I asked him the other day how he had slept the night before, and he said with the merest hint of a wry smile – With my eyes shut! Oh, how many times over my lifetime I’ve heard that same response, and how wonderful to hear it now. I’m not in denial, I do know that dad’s mind is slowly disintegrating, but personally I prefer to focus on what we can still share together rather than on what has been lost between us.

Dementia really focuses me on the importance of spending whatever time I can with dad, while he’s still with us, while he still knows us. So I visit him, and sit with him, and chat with him. I hold his hand, and hug him and let him feel the familial security of the father-daughter bond that has always been so strong between us. We are where we are in life, but he’s still my dad and I love him as much today as I always have done… ❤

Christmas Decorations I Have Known…

I’m not really one to over-do Christmas decorations – I do have a twinkling tree bedecked with tinsel and ornaments and lights and topped with this cute little fairy, and I like to add a bit of extra festive frippery to the fireplace – well, across the top of the mantelpiece, to be exact. Most of our Christmas decorations in this house have been collected one by one (or group by group) over the years and part of the fun when putting them all together each Christmas is remembering the where and when and how and why we bought them, or were given them, or made them ourselves for that matter!

I remember us buying this little fairy one year after Christmas, in the sales – she was sitting all alone in a sea of random leftover tree ornaments at knock-down prices but still she was smiling, so we paid 50p for her and took her home with us and have loved her ever since. At the time we lived in a small flat so didn’t even have the room to put up a proper tree, instead we just decorated the sideboard with the odd personally-chosen ornament or two, a practice which of course expanded every year as we built up our very own collection of bargain basement Christmas remnants so that today we have a unique festive family of ornamental misfits that seems to suit us very well.

So I suppose looking back over the years, many of my favourite festive memories are linked to the individual Christmas decorations I have known and loved at any given time. Every Christmas my sister still hangs a small red plaited fabric wreath I made for her decades ago, even before her children were born. My youngest daughter still hangs the larger green version we used to have ourselves when she was growing up. In fact she also still has the green candles shaped like Christmas trees from her childhood I bought one year and didn’t ever have the heart to burn. They’ve faded a bit in colour, but have now become part of her family tradition, taking over from ours.

The Christmas decorations I remember from my childhood in the 1960s were mostly made from coloured crepe paper, concertinaed bells and baubles and long magical chains that unfurled to festoon the ceiling like the trim on a frothy petticoat. We always had a real tree, too, that stood precariously propped up in a bucket and smelled of pine resin and shed little needles all over the carpet for the duration. On the tree there were very fragile glass baubles and more robust plastic versions that shimmered and shone, along with multi-coloured fairy lights and feathery silvery tinsel. We had a fairy for the top of the tree then, too, with plastic head and arms and body and painted hair and a long white lacy dress and stiffened underskirt that covered her lack of legs!

I know many people choose to change their Christmas decorations along with their room decor, or go for particular fashionable colour themes, but I must admit I’m not one of them. Much of my modest collection tends to stay the same year after year. Most are traditional white or red or green or silver or gold or combinations thereof, and they don’t so much match as go together in a kind of eclectic, organic mish-mash of memories that make me smile. Some things inevitably come and go, depending on circumstance, and some things stay the course. And I kind of like it that way, it’s less about aiming for a perfect ideal and more about simply making the most of what is in front of me and loving the reality of the result regardless :-).

Weekly Prompt: Festive Memories