Regulars THIS LIFE Ciara Geraghty

I SAW MY PARENTS KISS – I mean like a proper, movie-screen kiss – only once. I was 11 and appalled. It was the early 1980s and public displays of affection were not a ‘thing’ yet.

The ways they comforted me with their compatibility were usually more subdued than that. Like in the car. Me and my brother sat in the back seat, looking out opposite windows while my little sister stood between us, always condemned to be in the middle, bouncing on her small feet, humming along to music that only she could hear.

My mother in the front passenger seat, her mouth frozen in a circle as she applied lipstick to her reflection in the tiny mirror on the sun visor. My father, flinging open the driver’s door and arranging himself behind the wheel. He would turn the key in the ignition, look at my mother and reach his hand out. I’d hold my breath. But even when she was mad with him, she couldn’t hold out. She always took the hand he offered.

When I think back to those car journeys to my grandmother’s house in Baileborough, Co. Cavan, I remember Liquorice Allsorts, my sister’s hair, swinging in their pigtails, the windows down, the laden sweetness of my mother’s perfume, the smoke curling from the cigarette between my father’s fingers. He had a way of smoking that I loved, even back then. There was an elegance to it. His enjoyment was a palpable thing.

He doesn’t smoke any more. He has dementia now. Has had it, we think, for ten years or more. My mother first noticed it on one of those car journeys. He drove down the road, stopped at the junction of Millview Road and Swords Road, drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, looked left and right. The road was clear of traffic but still he did not release the handbrake. He waited. Perhaps my mother did not notice right away. Perhaps she applied lipstick to the frozen circle of her mouth, reflected in the tiny mirror on the sun visor.

‘Why aren’t you going?’ Maybe that’s what she said when she snapped the tube of her lipstick shut, and looked up. There was no fear in her voice. Not then.

‘Is it left or right?’ he said. He didn’t look at her when he said it, just drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. ‘You know it’s right. What are you on about?’ He turned right. Drove on. Neither of them referred to his earlier enquiry. The rest of the journey was uneventful and my mother put the incident down to a one of a hundred things. Put it away. Thought that was the end of that. Except it wasn’t. It was the beginning.

Dementia is a thief in the night, stealthy and sly. At first, it takes small things. Things you’d barely notice. Things you’d put down to carelessness. Or tiredness. Or common-or-garden forgetfulness. But it comes back, this thief. It keeps coming back until, one day, you look around and the cupboards are bare.

Ten years later, my once articulate father is losing his words. He puts his pyjamas on over his clothes, he puts the milk in the breadbin, he talks about going home except he doesn’t mean the home he has shared with my mother for nearly 40 years.

He means Harold’s Cross where he grew up, the second eldest of seven children. He doesn’t remember his brothers and sisters but he wants to go back to the house where they all once lived.

He remembers an abattoir in the field behind his house. He and his siblings used to sit on the garden wall and watch a man stun the cows with a captive bolt pistol, watch it like it was a programme on the telly. He asks me how many children I have and what ages they are. This is the man who once carried my baby daughter’s buggy – with my baby cocooned inside – over a gravelly path in Skerries which he declared ‘too rough’ for Sadhbh. The man who sat for hours in Sadhbh’s ‘hairdressing salon’ while she brushed his hair and attempted to cut it with a toy scissors. He would have let her cut it with a real scissors if she’d asked him. She called him Papa. He called her his Princess. He knew her. He loved her. Nobody could have loved her more.

Now he asks his wife where her husband is. There are many questions he asks but this is the one she can answer with no hesitation. ‘I don’t know.’ That’s what she says when he asks her that one. My mother sometimes describes herself as demented when the day has been too hard, too tiring, too frustrating, too sad. I tell her she’s not allowed be demented, I can only handle one at a time. She’ll have to wait her turn. She laughs then, makes me a cup of tea, asks me if I have any news?

I look at her. She has no idea how strong she is. I remember her in the car on all our journeys, holding my father’s hand.

Dementia is a thief in the night, stealthy and sly. At first, it takes small things, things you’d barely notice. But it comes back, it keeps coming back