THIS LIFE Julie Parsons

IT WAS THREE DAYS before Christmas 2007. I walked into my mother’s house and called out her name.

‘Hi Mum, how are you?’ I waited. I’d been dreading this moment for months. I knew it would come. The house was silent. I moved towards her bedroom. She was lying on the floor, wearing her nightie, one slipper on, one slipper off. There was a smear of blood across her forehead. Her eyes were closed. I knelt and touched her cheek. She didn’t respond. I reached for the phone.

My mother was 85. She had always been strong and independent, lived on her own, lived her own life. But age was beginning to catch up. The final straw was when her doctor would no longer allow her to drive. Despair had set in.

Despair and physical decline. She was two months in hospital. Heart failure; her liver and kidney functions were compromised. Then the dreadful infection, clostridium dificile. C. Diff as it’s known by us who’ve watched what it does to the body of its host. When at last the hospital let her leave she was not the woman she once had been. She could not return to her old life. I found a nursing home. It was nice. Well run and the staff were friendly and caring. But she hated it. She could not accept nursing home life. And the evil beast that is Lewy body dementia was beginning to drag her down. Sometimes she was fine, her old self. Other times she was beset with hallucinations, terrifying demons, noises in the night, rats under her bed.

‘You’ve no idea,’ she says to me, her face contorted with horror, ‘no idea what goes on here at night’.

I discussed what she said with the nursing home staff. They assured me that nothing went on at night. And I believed them. I visited at different times. It was always fine. But not as far as my mother was concerned. Often she thought I was her mother. Sometimes she would confront me, her face torn with grief. ‘Why didn’t you tell me Mummy was dead?’ she’d cry. In vain I tried to explain that ‘Mummy’, her mother, had been dead for over 50 years. My mother’s heart was broken and mine was too.

‘Step back,’ friends advised. But I couldn’t. My sister and two brothers, who all loved my mother dearly, lived on the other side of the world. My mother’s grandchildren loved her too and they did what they could. But I was at the centre of the storm. I was now her mother, her daughter, her carer, her gaoler.

One day the nursing home phoned to say she had been found at the front gate. Walking stick in one hand, large handbag in the other. She was making a break for freedom. I laughed and cried.

I did a lot of laughing and crying. Like the time I took her to a gerontologist for an assessment of her mental state. He gave her a test. Simple questions to be answered. The date, the name of the Taoiseach. Triangles, squares and circles to be drawn. She struggled with them all. He called her ‘Mum’, and spoke to me over her head. At last she snapped. As he attempted to listen to her heart she pushed him away. ‘You’re nothing but a right shite,’ she said, and all I could do was agree. We both cried as we left his office.

I waited for her to settle down, to accept the nursing home. But it never happened. She railed against this new life which would never be her life. I visited every day. There were regular trips to A&E. She fell often, despite the precautions the nursing home took.

I got used to the vagaries of the hospital system. One night we waited from 10pm until seven the next morning. I was patient, she wasn’t.

‘Get up there,’ she instructed. Her look was murderous. ‘Get up there and make a fuss.’ I did as I was told. The triage nurse explained. Two traffic accidents. Multiple serious injuries. But she brought us tea and when the handsome Australian doctor finally arrived to stitch the cut on my mother’s head, he flirted with her and they discussed her many years living in the Antipodes.

Her death when it came was dramatic. Sudden excruciating pain. A perforated bowel. Her heart was too weak for the operation. The palliative care team took over. I summoned my siblings from around the world.

And then the miracle happened. My daughter, who was pregnant, called me as I sat by my mother’s bed. She had asked me to be her birth partner. Now the time had come. She was in labour.

I hurried into Holles Street. Three hours later her son, my grandson, my mother’s great-grandson was born. My mother’s name was Elizabeth, the baby would be called, in her honour, Eli.

Out of the dark comes light. Out of death comes life. And life goes on.

The nursing home phoned to say Mum had been found at the gate, walking stick in one hand, handbag in the other. She was making a break for freedom