Cruel rule stopping my parents dancing
LAST week, I took my 87-year-old father for his first Covid vaccination. I don’t know when my mother, who is 83 and has dementia, will have the jab; her care home has not received any communication from the Government about vaccines or testing to allow relatives to visit, or for the staff. A month ago, when my father and I had a window visit with my mother, I showed her pictures of them dancing . It brought a beautiful smile to her face. My parents met at a dance hall in Liverpool. She was a nurse who had come over from Ireland to work at Walton Hospital in the 1960s. They were fabulous, glamorous dancers. It is not easy to communicate with my mum due to her illness, but her smile encouraged my father to hold out his arms as if he were dancing, and he swayed from side to side. ‘I want to hold you in my arms,’ he said boyishly. My mother looked 20 years younger, with a twinkle in her eyes. On the way to our next visit, Dad stretched his arms out in the car. ‘I’m just trying to figure something out, dancing maybe, how it feels to hold my Mary,’ he told me. He hasn’t been allowed to touch his wife of 56 years for nine months. He is dancing with dementia. My father recently had a mild health scare and I thought: ‘What if he died and never got to hold his Mary again?’ I’m living on a knife edge of fear and anxiety that I can’t fix this for them. Every day people in my online dementia support group lose a loved one from whom they have been brutally separated. I feel as if I have an egg-timer guillotine hanging over my head. How long will it be until my mother does not recognise my father? We are living on borrowed time. It feels especially cruel that fragile elderly people who may not have much time left are not able to be physically close to their loved ones, especially when I know it is possible to fix this situation. Every family member would gladly have tests and isolate for as long as necessary to be able to see and hold their loved one. Why can a carer hold my mother’s hand and brush her hair, but her husband can’t, even if he wears gloves? I can understand why some people feel driven to ‘abduct’ their loved ones from a care home. Not being able to see and hug my mother is so surreal I can barely get my head around it. How could someone with dementia understand the implications of the virus? I’ve never felt so helpless. The lovely care staff sent me pictures of my mother dancing at the home’s Christmas party. It was so poignant and painful to know she could still dance with my father. The question is when, if ever again?
DEIRDRA BARR, Timperley, Cheshire.