The shortest day, over and over

I went to visit my dad on the Winter Solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year. I brought him a chocolate reindeer and a card my son had designed at school, with a rainbow-coloured Christmas tree against a sky of orange.

Even though it was daytime, the sky was so grey it hardly seemed to get properly bright at all.

“This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,
the year’s threshold
and unlocking, where the past
lets go and becomes the future.”
– Margaret Atwood

Part of the problem with dementia is the way it traps you between past and future, or between time zones, in strange ways. I bring chocolate treats for my 76-year-old dad. I speak to him slowly and clearly so he can understand. I am his daughter, but I feel that being a daughter has been taken away from me.

I long to be a proper daughter again – to have my dad take care of me, to be able to talk to him about all sorts of things, to ask him for help. I long to take care of him properly too, but all I can do is visit him in these brief snatches, entreat him not to get out of the wheelchair because he’ll fall over.

I am a mother now, and I feel myself pulled between roles. I sit beside my dad and show him pictures and videos, explaining who I am, who my children are. Time collapses in on itself. I speak to him as you might speak to a child, and yet he is my parent. I feel grief and tenderness and responsibility all at once.

Advanced dementia feels like living on a threshold for an impossibly long time. My dad isn’t ready to cross over, and so we remain suspended. It feels to me like advanced dementia is the shortest day, over and over again. The sun’s midnight.

There have been moments that felt like progress – times when my dad regained some mobility – but then back we go again, and he’s in a wheelchair. The words are going, and going, and maybe one day they’ll be gone. Or perhaps even then there will be moments where we can exchange something meaningful, however fleeting.

I can’t seem to let go of the past – of wanting my dad and my family to look like they used to, of wanting Christmas to be a time of simple joy. I hold a younger version of my dad in my mind: a dad who was capable, curious, dependable. A dad who could help me. A dad I could lean on.

After visiting him, I went home and lay on the sofa under a blanket with my son and daughter, watching Elf. The joy and light of our living room felt impossibly far from the difficult reality of my dad in the care home. And yet both things are true. We straddle the dark and the light at this time of year.