Journey into the dark
“Hi mate, how are you?” is a rather ordinary phrase but it is one that has haunted me over the past few months. It keeps resounding because when I heard it during a January visit to the care home where my father now lives it reminded me of what my Dad used to be like.
Dad suffers with dementia. Usually when members of the family visit, he sits, occasionally acknowledging us but usually just fiddling with things. It is most unbearable when he appears to be in some kind of torment.
The home on the south coast seems a good one, and the care assistants see to his basic needs. As well as dealing with problems like his incontinence, they do their best to stimulate responses and seem very attentive.
It has been difficult for all the family to come to terms with my father’s situation. My parents have been married for 52 years and Mum copes, partly by reminding herself of better times.
Dad was always very much in control. He had come up the hard way. The son of a postman, he worked as a messenger in Mount Pleasant Post Office in London at the age of 14. He progressed in the Post Office before joining the navy during the Second World War. At the age of 19 he was flying a Swordfish plane on and off aircraft carriers. He came down in the Channel twice.
On leaving the navy, after the war, he trained as a teacher. He met my mother working at a school called Kensington in East Ham, east London. He later became a deputy head and then head of Elmhurst School in Upton Park, a stone’s throw from West Ham football ground. The school is one of the biggest primaries in the country.
He was a good father and never happier than when with the family. He wasn’t one of those men who constantly seem to be trying to run away from their family responsibilities, and if he were able to recall I have little doubt that his best times were on the beaches of Camber Sands, Hastings and Bexhill when we were all together in the school holidays of the 1970s. He loved swimming.
From my perspective he was always some one who was there for you in time of trouble or at any other time. Today it seems that the backstop of my life has gone and I am very much on my own.
Now 85, Dad first started to show serious signs of dementia around 2001 and it has been a gradual slide since then. He became more withdrawn. I remember him sitting more on the side at Christmas 2003 rather than being in the thick of things as had always been the case before. The situation became a great deal worse in May 2004 and was followed by 18 months of rapid drift downhill until he went into the first home. Since then he has been in three homes. The doctor mentioned there could have been a minor stroke.
I can trace his decline by reading his diaries. The entries begin to thin out and become a lot shorter around 2003. There are entries about how worried he is about not being able to remember things he did in the morning. He kept all this to himself and it must have been a very difficult time, being aware of his own deterioration and not being able to do anything about it. I think he always had worries about dementia, though, given that his mother had suffered from dementia.
Visits to his south coast home are particularly difficult, recalling the alert and vigorous man he once was. But however difficult it is for the family seeing Dad in this state, what might it be like for him? We don’t know how dementia sufferers feel. They may not be in torment at all, but in their own world where they are very happy. It is something we will probably never know.
When we visit the home, we do sometimes wonder whether there is any point in our visits. Does Dad remember anything? Does he know who we are? Then there are phases when a dementia sufferer has greater lucidity and remembers things from the past. The “Hi, mate” moment was one of those. Sometimes when Dad looks at us and then turns away, we do wonder if he is ignoring us in protest at being stuck in a home. The feelings of guilt arise.
There is always a worry about whether it is right to put someone you love in a home. Given what they did for you, surely the time has come to give up some of our lives for them? The questions and self-recrimination can go on and on and eventually a decision does have to be made. There is no manual for dealing with mental illness. That is why it is so encouraging for people like me for the Catholic Church’s Day for Life (the day in the year dedicated to celebrating the sacredness of life) to be used this year to highlight mental-health issues and raise awareness across parishes of the needs of people suffering with mentalhealth problems.
Today, one in four people suffers with some form of mental illness. Gratifyingly, most do get better. But as to chronic conditions, there are 700,000 dementia cases in the United Kingdom and around 25 million people, or 42 per cent of the population, are affected by dementia through knowing a close friend or family member with the condition. Alzheimer’s is the most common cause of dementia. According to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, there is one new case of dementia every three minutes in England and Wales.
It is important that there is support not only for those with mental illness but for the carers. Looking after my Dad as he plunged deeper into dementia over a year and a half took its toll on my mother’s health. She lives with the consequences. She is now very nearly blind, and lives alone, supported in the main by the family and local parish.
The support of such networks is crucial to help people survive such traumatic times. While we are fortunate to have the NHS and social services, there is a kind of care, of love and support, that they cannot provide. It would be good to see as a result of Day for Life this year the question of mental illness become far more of an issue in parishes.
Mental-health problems can lead to a very lonely existence for patients and carers. But mental illness is a growing problem, not least because dementia and Alzheimer’s cases are growing in number as people live longer. It can only really be dealt with by the community coming together and offering its collective support.
No comments:
Post a Comment