Suddenly, a shaft of light in the gloom
Yesterday I set off to go and spend the weekend with my ancient father on the south coast. His short-term memory is none too good these days as I have previously mentioned.
A representative example would be the fact that – despite having rung him as I was setting off to drive down – when I arrived at his house some two hours later I was greeted with a surprised “What are you doing here, I had no idea you were coming today …”
As the family has learned – via a combination of personal experience and advice from his live-in carers who come to stay on a two or three week rotation basis – you must deal with aged relatives as they are at any particular stage of life, not as they were or ought to be – or indeed still are sometimes, e.g. when, against recent history and all expectations, he or she suddenly out of the blue makes some pithy or incisive contribution to a conversation.
There’s no point at all in getting irritated or frustrated when their short-term memory begins to leave them and they keep repeating the same questions umpteen times a day.
“But for goodness sake, Dad – you only asked me that fifteen minutes ago …” is not a rejoinder usefully to be deployed (for either you or him) in reference to his seventh or eighth query about what is happening tomorrow.
One just learns not to pass comment on the fact the question is being repeatedly asked, one just provides the answer yet again without ceremony.
He cannot help the fact he cannot remember what has recently been said – or that, for example, when you have already been staying with him two nights, every morning when he comes down for breakfast his first utterance of the day is “Christ, when did you get here?”
In this context one interjection my father made yesterday was worthy of being noted.
Amidst the litany of repeated ‘question and answer’ dross – after which I had made a phone call to put my father’s latest carer on the family’s car insurance policy and then sought out a newspaper (in order to confirm the day’s date) in preparation for a note I was about to add to the insurance ring-binder file – when I said out loud “9th February”, my father commented immediately “That’s the date my father died”, which was the first correct statement he’d uttered in nearly five hours.
Yes, my paternal grandfather, then aged 48, had died exactly 76 years ago in a motor accident on Salisbury Plain when my father was sixteen. A brief conversation about him followed and then we all raised a glass in his honour.
At one point I mentioned the occasion that at a lunch not long before he died, one of my father’s oldest pals had told my brothers and I a memory of my grandfather.
We’d specifically asked him for one partly because my father and his sister (my aunt) so rarely spoke of him.
My father’s pal had told of the time during a school holidays when, in his early teens, he had been to stay at my father’s family home.
One early evening, as the pair of them were sitting in the drawing room, my grandfather had popped his head in to say goodnight before he set off to attend to some formal military function dressed in his full Brigadier’s mess uniform complete with his impressive row of WW1-gained medals pinned to his chest.
My father’s pal continued “… and I just thought to myself, ‘That is one hell of a man’…”
My father contemplated my tale for some time and then, with his eyes moistening slightly, commented “I guess that I never really appreciated how special a man he was”.
I suggested to him that this was one of the ironies of life.
A combination, if you like, of the saying in the (King James) Bible ‘A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house’ [my modern translation might be: ‘You may be a famous celebrity but you’ll only ever be an ordinary man to those in your own family and home town’] and the general notion that we only ever fully appreciate someone or something when he, or it, has finally gone forever.
Thinking about this overnight, I reflected upon the fact my father had expressed regret that at the time he’d never fully grasped – and/or perhaps never had a conversation with his father expressing pride in – his father’s achievements.
But that’s life, isn’t it?
If you knew in advance the date upon which people you know and love are going to pass on, there’s a hell of a lot you’d probably like to say to, or discuss with, them.
Yet, as things stand – as we go on living life day by day – we never do.
