LIVING WITH DEMENTIA
Six-page Health special
IT WAS a glorious spring day and I had taken my 86-year-old mother out for our weekly lunch together. As always, Madge – she was never called anything else – was the epitome of grace, dressed in a tasteful blue cotton dress. But toward the end of our starter, she put down her cutlery, grabbed her soup bowl with both hands and hoisted it to her lips.
‘Mum, what are you doing?’ I whispered furiously.
She drained the bowl, put it back down on the table and replied gently but firmly: ‘If it’s good enough for the French, it’s good enough for me.’
I laughed out loud.
Earlier, I’d mentioned that guests at a French wedding I’d
been to drank from their bowls. It was hilarious but also unexpected because, believe me, this just wasn’t how Mum behaved.
A working-class woman with aspirations, she had more than a shade of Hyacinth Bucket – pronounced Bouquet, of course – in her. Friends even called her ‘Queen Madge’ and ‘Her Madgesty’ on account of her Royal wave.
Growing up, she’d tell me off for using my soup spoon incorrectly. ‘Push it away from the bowl,’ she’d say.
She never swore, considering it a poor reflection on a person’s character, and cared deeply about what others thought of her. Yet here she was, that day in 2009, slurping from her soup bowl. I’d never seen her so spirited and uninhibited. The reason for this extraordinary personality shift? Dementia.
Unarguably, it is a devastating illness that can rob sufferers of their wit and warmth. But for Mum, it did the opposite.
Once nervous and shy – often overwrought – all that evaporated.
Dementia freed her from the worries and pain that had burdened her throughout her life. She was able to finally let go, throw a lifetime of caution to the wind and, as the mindfulness gurus would say today, live in the moment. It was as if she’d been let out of prison.
SHY MUM BECAME EXTROVERT MUM
LOOKING back, Mum’s problems first became apparent after my father’s death from kidney cancer in 2004.
About a year after he passed away, it became clear she was neglecting herself. She wasn’t eating: I’d take her meals and make her cups of tea, then find them untouched when I visited a few days later. And I could see that she was losing weight.
Mum was always one to have the house just so, but it was becoming a bit dusty and unkempt.
Then, one day in September 2005, I arrived to find her on the floor – she was confused about how she’d got there. I called an ambulance and doctors later said she was severely dehydrated.
She was admitted to a residential mental health unit attached to her local hospital in Woolwich.
And it was here I was given the awful – but not entirely surprising – news that she had dementia.
Over the next six months, she began to eat and her health improved. Indeed, by March 2006, she was well enough to move into an old people’s home.
And then the new Madge began to emerge. One morning, I got a call from the manager at the home asking me to come in.
‘Madge turned up to breakfast this morning a bit squiffy,’ she told me.
I was puzzled. Mum had never been a drinker. She might enjoy a gin and tonic while cooking Sunday lunch, or a couple of glasses of wine around Christmas, but that was it.
When I visited Mum later that day and asked her about it, she replied: ‘I fancied an amaretto. I was thirsty.
Is that a crime?’ Of course it wasn’t. But it wasn’t normal either.
Mum, I discovered, had entered the breakfast room with a ‘Whoopee!’, waving her walking stick triumphantly in the air.
Pre-dementia Madge – a shy type who preferred to blend in rather than stick out – would have grimaced at this kind of behaviour. But that was just the start of it.
She would often pull faces behind care home staff she didn’t like, and roll her eyes if someone said something she didn’t agree with instead of nodding politely, as she had done all her life.
And there was her increasingly colourful language. ‘It’s OK, they’re all deaf,’ she replied when I told her off, fearing that she would offend the other residents.
Mum had lost her inhibitions about using what she once would have called ‘rude words’. Now she took great pleasure in using them, and being ‘naughty’. It was as if her inner rebel was coming out.
She had been so conventional, so keen to blend in, and now another side of her was unleashed.
DEMENTIA FREED HER FROM PAIN OF GRIEF
AS THE years wore on, it was hard to grieve the old Madge when the new one was so joyful and full of fun and laughter. Soon I began to think of my mother almost as two different people.
Before dementia, she was always anxious and worried about everything. She was never spontaneous or willing to take risks.
I am certain this was linked to the heartbreak she had experienced throughout her life. It began with the loss of her father, a First World War veteran, to suicide in 1943.
Two years later, her beloved elder brother Jack perished in the Battle of the Atlantic.
Her only son, my brother, died of a drugs overdose in 1980. But like many of her generation, she didn’t dwell on hard times. After all, everybody else was going through them too. She would just say: ‘Life can be tough but we carry on.’
Once, during a difficult time in my own life, I cried while talking to her about it. ‘It won’t help you now, the tears,’ she declared. ‘They won’t make any difference.’
I still think about that.
She must have shed so many tears, and had to bear so much pain and still managed to ‘carry on’.
But that all seemed to just disappear under the cloak of dementia.