I wrote this last summer when my father was in hospital after a fall. He couldn’t come home because he kept trying to pull off the neck brace he had to wear, so he ended up spending months there until we managed to get him into a care home. It was so hard to visit him in the hospital. It feels hard in the care home now, but at least in the care home, he has his own room and friends, he wears his own clothes, and he watches TV.
My father is still in the damn hospital. I haven’t visited him enough. I come every now and then when I can, when I have the mental bandwidth. It’s so hard to see him here.
Has anyone talked about the shame of not wanting to come and visit?
How it’s easier not to consider what they have become if you don’t see them?
Today I arrive as close to the end of the visiting hours as I can get away with, after getting my children ready for bed and waiting for my partner to get back from the office.
It’s a summer evening, and the sky is still bright and high and hopeful, stippled with mackerel clouds. The London streets are bathed in golden light as people stand laughing outside pubs, holding golden beers. Everything is sparkling.
I drive aimlessly around the leafy streets trying to find the perfect parking space, getting distracted by the beautifully neat Victorian houses, passing parking spaces that would have been fine, there must be a better place. I’m delaying the inevitable, walking into the stale artificial air of the hospital and coming face to face with my father’s decline.
I don’t know how to talk to him any more. He doesn’t have enough words he remembers any more, or not enough that make sense together. He sits propped up in bed on pillows, turns to smile affably but blankly at me as I come into the room.
He’s in his neck brace that I’m told he still tries to pull off several times a day (and night). It still looks uncomfortable. His neck still isn’t healed.
He’s still in these strange papery hospital pyjamas in Aero Mint green. I wish he was wearing normal pyjamas at least, something soft and cotton and familiar.
The other three men who share his hospital room rotate – we’ve been here for so long, my father is the last one standing. The shouty man is gone, and there’s a silent man who always seems asleep. Today, there’s also an orthodox Jewish man in the bed next door to my father talking animatedly to two visitors in Yiddish.
I try to smile at my father, tend to him in vague ways, tucking in his bed sheets, brushing crumbs off the weird pyjamas, but there’s nothing I can do for him.
We eat biscuits, look at old photo albums. I’m so thankful he made them, even if he can’t tell me anything about the places in them. They’re proof he lived, he travelled, he made the most of his short (lucid) time on this beautiful earth.
God I miss him.
God I want him out of here.
But we’re still waiting for a space to become available in a care home for respite care. There are doctors and social workers to meet, boxes to be ticked, proof needed that he can’t be sent back home in this neck brace he tries to pull away from his fragile fractured bones. In the meantime, he stays here, staring at the ceiling. But he doesn’t seem to mind. Only I do.
I want real pyjamas. I want a television he can pretend to watch. I want the trappings of normality, even if he hardly seems to need them.
I always leave crying. People avert their gaze as I walk through the labyrinth of hospital corridors back out into the now fading golden light. Perhaps they think I’ve just received bad news, but this bad news I’ve been carrying around with me for years now.
It was a day of crying, my son’s last day at the playgroup we’ve been coming to every week since he was a baby I carried there in a sling. At the end of the playgroup, after we’ve sat around singing the nursery rhymes we sing every week, he’s called to the front of the room with the other children starting school in September. He stands up there, suddenly seeming much taller and smiling proudly as the kind woman who runs the playgroup wishes them luck.
I feel proud too that we made it this far, through those tough baby and toddler years that demanded everything from me. I’m relieved he’s joining his sister at school, that I won’t have to sit around singing ‘Wind the bobbin up’ and pretending I don’t hate it. We made it through these hours and years. We enter a new era and that makes me cry.
And all the time my father sits here in bed staring at the ceiling.
dementia in the family 