‘When melancholy really wants to track you down, it doesn’t need your Eircode’

THIS WOMAN’S LIFE

IWENT to visit my sister today. She is 64 and she has vascular dementia. She knew me and was happy to see me. She is in respite care for a couple of weeks.

I brought her 20 John Player Blue. We borrowed a lighter from an ancillary worker who was adamant that when I return it I put it into her hand. My sister Mary said they were not allowed lighters in case we burn the place down.

“We forget things, that’s why we’re here,” she said. “I’m here three weeks now.”

I knew she was just a few days there.

You’re always looking out for clues that will tell you how the memory is deteriorating. It’s almost obscene, it gives you subtle information about the person you are visiting. You weigh up clues as if you were Columbo. Have you the right even? We went to the smoking area and Mary had two cigarettes during our visit. She likes the place.

“The food is good, the nurses are nice,” she said.

That, after all, is what we want to hear. That is the depth of it. Food good, nurses nice. I asked where her room was, she wasn’t sure.

“It might be over there,” she said and indicated towards a ward.

When I was leaving I realised that I could not get out without the door code. It is the little things that remind you that people are not free to walk out the door.

Mary won’t be here for too long. She is being assessed for a nursing home that she might get by the end of the year, or next year, if all her paperwork is in order. At 64 she is very young for a nursing home. She will more than likely have to throw her family home into the mix.

There was no signs of dementia in 2012 when she went to Beachy Head to collect the remains of her son John who died by suicide.

When I was leaving she said: “I miss my doggies. They won’t know where I am.”

It was a defining moment that I had no answer for.

At that exact second all the niceties of the visit — the few laughs in the smoking room, the good food, nice nurses, the visit itself — all came to a halt. She was worried that her dogs wouldn’t know where she was. (Her dogs are well looked after by her son who lives in the family home.)

Later, when I was trying to make sense of it all I thought of Beckett and how he sometimes got characters to invent short-term memories. How did Beckett know so much about life? I don’t like the term “the human condition” because of the psycho-babble connotations, and because it can mean everything and nothing. Beckett knew so much about loss and the art of losing. Mary’s loss is ongoing and relentless. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,” Beckett wrote in Endgame.

Later still I thought about the eighth deadly sin — melancholy. It fell in with lust, gluttony, greed, anger, sloth, pride and envy but got booted out many years ago.

Melancholy was there on the visit. Sometimes it hung around a big armchair with a small person nestled in it. It was there in the corridor when a man with a zimmer frame stopped and looked into the space ahead.

You can’t always see melancholy but you can feel it. It’s no sin but it’s certainly a curse. It has no colour or smell but its presence is unmistakable and there’s no hiding from it. When melancholy wants you, it doesn’t need your Eircode to find you. This weekend I will be travelling to the UK to read in Ulverston Coronation Hall in Cumbria as part of the ‘Poem and a Pint’ series. It is the first time since 2013 that I will be travelling on this particular Irish airline.

In 2013 I had been invited by the Reading In a Secure Environment project. I’d been working with British writer John Burnside. He was visiting prisons and I was doing workshops in other secure environments, like psychiatric hospitals.

At the time I was ordered by this particular Irish airline to leave my nifty case at the boarding gate. I can still feel the humiliation of walking across the tarmac with items falling out of the nylon bag that I had to carry my belongings in when they demanded I leave my case.

I felt sorry for a lot of elderly couples who were on their hands and knees rummaging trying to make things fit neater for fear of their bags being confiscated. I wonder who eventually took my bag (I’d actually bought it in the States for $130). There was no mercy shown me that day. I’m anxious about the trip this weekend. Cryanair (an excerpt) I felt like the biggest loser walking across the tarmac. Small items falling out the corner hole of my Winners bag. I looked back at the toothpaste, my travel-size bottle of Argan oil to nail down my wiry hair. A pair of pink knickers 40 years too young for me. I saw the Crier a lean and mean figure inside the glass, just looking. A new queue was forming. There was misery to measure and he was hand-picked to do it. He turned on his heel. I’d swear I heard a click. minutes you have twelve minutes you have eight minutes you have five minutes you have no minutes. The Crier won. I went down on my hands and knees and collected my belongings. I stuffed them into a nylon bag that I bought for a dollar in Canada months before. It had Winners written on it. I left my nifty bag with the buck wheels at the boarding gate. Can I speak to the manager, please? I’m the only manager you need to please. You have three choices he said, clicking his teeth: You can pay the seventy euros cash you can pay the seventy euros by credit card or you can leave the bag. He counted me down in