I made a commitment to shoot my mother several years ago. She was completely serious when she asked me to but I was far from serious when I reassured her that I would. I was only in my late teens at the time.
Here is our definition of LEGACY
1. Money or property bequeathed to another by will.
2. Something handed down from an ancestor or a predecessor or from the past:
My legacy from my mother’s side of my family may be a little unconventional. It is, I fear, Alzheimer’s Disease. My maternal Grandparents both died very, very slowly from it.
Someone recently told me how their father died aged seventy nine whilst on a long distance bike ride. He had a massive heart attack and collapsed in front of the home of a GP who, fortunately, wasn’t at work that day and was able to pronounce him dead. His daughter thought he would have been overjoyed to have died doing something he loved and to be so well organised to arrange for his own physician in attendance. Deaths like that are unlikely to occur in my family.
My mother is one of six children. Her eldest sister died with dementia in 2005 and, like his father and mother, her eldest brother died a slow death from Alzheimer’s in 2007 with all that had been of his personality disappearing, a new one emerging and then nothing that could be described as personality replacing it. ‘He’ had died long before his body chose to. When I was young I spent a huge amount of time with my Grandparents following Jim around his garden or watching Ada cook in the kitchen. I know I should have spent more time with them as they declined. Their behaviour became odd, then bizarre and then worrying and then diagnosable probably before I entered my teens. Their death was long and slow and their lives ended as I was about to leave my teens. They died in different nursing homes within six months of each other. They were apart in their final days after over sixty years of marriage but neither knew that the person they’d shared their life with was missing. And then at my Grandfather’s funeral my mother asked me if I’d be good enough to shoot her if she should end up like her parents. Afterwards the six children sat and discussed their parents and wondered what the first sign of decline was; when my Grandparents convinced themselves my brothers were going to live in America even though they were only thirteen? When my Grandfather tried to withdraw his life's savings in cash and walked home with much of it in carrier bags? Or when he chose to paint the outside of their bungalow red?
I want to write this as a marker in time just in case.
So........My mum and dad visited to help us finally move our furniture out of the storage and into the house on the thirteenth. Although we speak on the phone often I haven't seen my parents since last October. I’m not sure if I recognised an increasing absence of presence or an increasing presence of absence but there are some things I want to note down about my mum. They may be nothing but I know that they were significant enough that within two hours of meeting them Marianna told me to stop staring at my mother and looking so worried. I had been at Birmingham Crown Court all day, mostly reading a book and didn’t return to Leamington until 6.30. I went to meet them and Marianna at their Bed and Breakfast (Our house isn’t fit for guests). I met Marianna at the door and we waited for my parents in the guest’s lounge. After a few minutes my mum stepped into the room, looked at us and said to my dad, who was still in the corridor, “It’s not them in there Dave”. I called to her and she came back in and seemed to recognise my voice before she recognised my face. Perhaps it was the suit that rendered me unrecognisable. We took them out for a meal and she was rather quiet and just ‘not my mum’. Perhaps like a crucial scene from Invasion of The Body Snatchers something was giving her away as not being the genuine article. She has the same hearing issue as me only worse and worsening and does struggle when there’s background noise but if you went back 5, 10, 20 years you’d never describe my mum as quiet. That’s my dad’s role; to be a man of few words and yet he’s downright chatty these days. I think it’s that he’s compensating for and covering up for my mum in the hope that you won’t notice that she isn’t really taking part in or driving the conversation anymore; she’s a passenger. She was the same the next day when we were moving the furniture; she was a passenger. I don’t expect someone approaching seventy to be lifting and carrying furniture but she looked lost. Imagine you’re at someone else’s house and they’re clearing things away after a meal or party. You don’t feel able to help out much because you don’t know where anything goes and you feel like a spare part. She looked like that but it wasn’t complex because everything needed to come out of the storage unit, go into the van and then go into the house. When I caught her eye, and I often did, she beamed at me but it was an awkward smile, like she’d been caught out. She also didn’t say anything. She’s becoming a mime. You should know that before she retired she was a manager. When Marianna, dad and I discussed how we might arrange things in the van my mum didn’t take part in the discussion but, more worryingly, having heard us conclude that we’d put the sideboard in a certain space we carried it to the van to find that mum had put a chair there. Later, as the three of us carried a sofa out of the van and into the house, me at one end and Marianna and dad in reverse at the other end I noticed that mum had piled the cushions just inside the door. It was just illogical. She was very apologetic. I told her not to worry. I said it so many times in less than two days. She only became a manager after a career change after my brothers and I left school. During our school years she was a cook in three different schools around the town (She may have poured some custard for you) . Even if that wasn’t the case she cooked every day for the five of us. When we took a break from loading and unloading we had some fish and salad for lunch. The fish was prepared on our camping stove. When the water began to boil and possibly boil over she became panicked and didn’t know what to do. It seemed simple enough to lift the pan off the heat or turn the heat down or off but she was lost. Also, since we now have carpet upstairs and downstairs is still a building site we keep our shoes on downstairs and take them off for upstairs but mum couldn’t grasp this and might remove them as she entered the kitchen. She also told me three times about the poor state that the house I grew up in and they moved from twenty years ago is now in.
We took them out again on Thursday evening. For Marianna’s benefit they reminisced about how they met in June 1962. My mum held my dad’s hand but I thought she was holding on more than holding.
I never thought you’d leave until you went.
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