Care home visits and old photos

I go to visit my dad in the care home. It always feels like it’s been too long since I last saw him.

It’s so hard to get there. Practically speaking, it’s difficult to find the time because I work full time and my weekends are filled with kids’ swimming lessons and birthday parties. Emotionally speaking, I always feel so drained afterwards that I need to make sure I’ve got a buffer of time to recover.

This evening I’m seeing friends, so I go in the early afternoon to give myself a couple of hours to recover – on this occasion for my eyes to de-puff after crying.

I thought I was done with crying, as the last few times I’d been to see him I hadn’t shed tears. I thought maybe I’d entered a new stage of acceptance. But this time it comes upon me even while I’m still sitting with him. I try to hide it as best I can because I’d hate to upset or unsettle him. I always worry my visits destabilise his predictable day, without adding crying into the mix.

He’s sitting in the lounge when I arrive – not on one of the sofas watching the film that many of the residents are watching, and not at a table chatting with a small group, but alone at a table, just sitting and staring, as he often does nowadays. It’s a pose you might expect of someone depressed: alone and vacant. But I can see it isn’t that. It just seems to be what he wants to do, and he seems content.

I say hello, give him a hug and sit down next to him. I talk about the end of the summer holidays and the kids going back to school. I show him pictures on my phone of them on the first day of term in their uniforms, posed in the same spot in our garden every year, brushed and shining and ready for another school year. Nothing gives you a sharper sense of time passing than watching your children charge through primary school this way. I want to cry at the beginning of the end of every school year.

And what brings on my tears with my dad? When I put down my phone and leave it on the table, he reaches for it as if he wants to see more pictures. So I pick it back up and start searching.

I remember that I recently made an album of photos of me and him together. I’d gone back through my phone and even photographed my old yellowing childhood album, collecting what I could and storing it in a folder.

What made me so sad putting the pictures together was how few of them I could find. My dad was always the one behind the camera on our family holidays. I seem to have taken on the same role with my family, snapping away with no evidence that I was there at all. This summer I tried to remind myself to hand my phone to my husband now and then, even though I hate photos of myself. I don’t want my children to find themselves as I have: with a parent slipping away and so few pictures of what they were like before they were lost.

So today in the care home I open this folder and swipe through the photos I could gather – me and my dad at the Christmas lunch table, leaning our heads together and smiling with paper crowns on; me and my dad at the Proms waving EU flags (it must have been around the time of the Brexit vote); me as a baby in a carrier on my dad’s back.

This is the one that does it.

He looks so young and cool with his dishevelled dark hair and beard, tight jeans and navy jumper, so much life ahead of him. I’m just a chubby pale head peering over the top of the carrier. I must have been heavy. Where were we going?

When I look at my dad now, he’s beginning to look unkempt. He’s clearly being washed and dressed by the care home staff, but he spills food down himself throughout the day. He was always well turned out, but now crumbs nestle on his nice John Lewis cardigan, his hair has grown too long and hangs down either side of his head, which is finally beginning to bald in the middle. He’s so far from the man in the photo, the young father with the huge head of black hair. But he’s also barely gone grey.

I’m 41 in a couple of weeks, and although most people my age are already greying, I’ve only just started to notice the occasional strand at the front. Like him, I wear tight jeans and loose navy jumpers, carrying my kids around as if I’m invincible. They’re five and eight – older than me in the photo, when I can’t have been one yet – but I still scoop them up whenever they’re sad or tired or when they’ve fallen. I want to carry them for as long as I can, before they become teenagers who want distance from me and these mad careering years of primary school are suddenly gone.

My therapist always reminds me it’s good to cry – that it releases tension, that it means I’m feeling my emotions rather than bottling them up. I try to remember this as I walk out of the care home in tears on this beautiful bright September day that feels like summer, even as the leaves are starting to brown and everything is changing.