THE BLACKRIDGE HOUSE
(Jonathan Ball, R267)
For a while the phone calls had been getting more insistent. She might be angry (‘I can’t stay here another second, please come and fetch me home’) or matter of fact (‘Hello darling, I’ve had lunch and I’m ready to go now’) or vaguely confused (‘Where are you? I need to come home’) or simply desperate (‘I’ve just arrived here and this place is unspeakable. Please let me come back’). At such times, even the comfort of the tree with its pigeons and squirrels could not reach her.
At first my mother would call during the day, sometimes several times. Then the midnight calls began, wrenching me from sleep to run downstairs and talk, and afterwards return to lie for hours with a pounding heart.
Usually I would say something like, ‘Everything’s all right. Look around the room. You can see your pictures, your books...That’s where you live now, you’ve been there several years.’
But the indefinite article that makes all the difference between home and a home sapped my conviction. For she knew, and I knew, that home was never like this. They never played this sort of music at home. They never ate this sort of food. Meals were not eaten alone with an aluminium spoon, or carried in on a tray by a person who speaks to one in that special intonation that is reserved for babies, pets and people to whom we wish to condescend. And the smells of the place, the smell of old people, sick people, cleaning fluids, these smells are different from the smell of home. And the pills, all the unknown pills to be swallowed each day. It was never like this at home. It was never like this.
Anyone could find the institutional culture of a nursing home distressing, particularly at the end of a life when the slow diminishing route from family house to cottage to retirement flat has brought you at last to this one room, this single bed, the last stop on the line. But the terror of exile is especially acute when you wake up each morning and you don’t know where you are, or what happened yesterday, and there is nothing familiar in the room, and the people who greet you are all foreigners.
‘These people get on my nerves,’ she said one day. ‘There’s no friendliness at all. Of course, the trees here are lovely. Never seen such green… It’s like walking into a puddle and getting splashed.’ ‘What is?’ ‘Not being able to remember. Because your brain gets muddled and mixes things up. It’s a great sadness.’
In the various strange states of confusion and memory loss that doctors call the dementias, the longing for home recurs as something persistent and unrequited.
Even when a person is living in a house she has known all her life, the disease of forgetting may render it alien, unrecognisable. She wants to go home. To be the person she was when she lived at home. Perhaps in the silence of her memory she detects the echo of a time when things and people resided in their places, and she was present to herself. At home. She felt at home. Please make yourself at home. Please take me back home. Please.
The way she put it when I picked up the phone one particular afternoon was, ‘I can’t stand this atmosphere. I don’t have any friends.’ And then, ‘I’m homesick. I want to go home. I’ve been living a strange life for the last few years, away from Natal.’
I tried to explain that it was nearly thirty years since she had left there, but she did not believe it. I said her old home was no longer there, and she did not believe that either. I said I’d thought about the possibility hundreds of times, but that Michael and the twins and I just could not have her come and stay with us at our house, that we were all working or at school, and she needed more care than we could provide.
‘But nobody does anything for me here!’ she said, astonished and affronted at the idea
Anyone could find the institutional culture of a nursing home distressing, particularly at the end of a life when the slow diminishing route from family house to cottage to retirement flat has brought you at last to this one room, this single bed, the last stop on the line.
that she might need looking after.
‘Yes, they do.’ I was arguing again, pointless. ‘You can’t walk any longer.’
‘Of course I can walk.’
‘And the wheelchair in your room?’
‘That’s for long walks. But otherwise I just walk around a lot.’
‘And your meals. They bring you your meals.’
‘They do not! I have my meals in the dining room. I had breakfast and lunch there, and I’ll have my supper there too. I can’t remember when I last had a meal in bed!’ ‘Lunch.’
‘Oh no. I wonder where you got that idea from.’
In that moment, the mind’s determination to escape, to find its way home, made it possible for her to construct whatever was needed to fit that fierce imperative.
For other residents of the nursing home who were not bedridden, there was in fact a small chance, even with all the gates and cameras in place, of making the break. So far, it had happened once since she had been there when a woman called Goldie walked out of the gate one morning with her shopping basket and never returned. I met her a few weeks later, on a city street. She was looking a little disreputable, but pleased and defiant.
‘I’ll never go back,’ she told me. ‘It’s a terrible place.’
The others were all still there. The old, the sick, the dying, the man who used to insist he was my mother’s husband, the woman who played air guitar in the corridor and sang romantic songs in Portuguese, the woman who had recently begun to hit the nurses in the face, the young man with no legs, the ones who simply sat and stared. And among this gathering of the lost was my mother herself in her upstairs room, not mixing with the other residents, choosing, at the cost of loneliness, to retain a measure of psychic space that was still her own.
It seemed easier to respond to Goldie’s dramatic escape than to my mother’s intense feeling of displacement. The literature on dementia care is full of practical suggestions on what to do about wanderers, people who want to go home. But there was nothing to help me answer this longing that
occupied the heart like the chafe of a bedsore that would not heal. ‘I just don’t know what to say.’ ‘Well, I understand the answer’s no. About coming home.’
‘It’s very hard for me to say this…’ I began.
She was thinking I was her mother, her sister, anything but her daughter. And all she wanted was for me to take her home. I felt it then, the weariness of it all. And the terror, hers and now mine, of waking to a place where there is nobody to hold you.
‘It sounds as though I’m rejecting you,’ I went on. ‘But I’m not. Please trust me when
I tell you that we just don’t have what it takes to care for you. You’re ninety-two years old. It’s normal to need looking after.’
‘Ninety-two? That’s why
I’m homesick.’
It was after this anguished conversation, or one of many like it, that I began to form the idea of visiting KwaZulu-Natal and looking for her family house at Blackridge, the only home she could remember.
It was not clear why I wanted to do this. Perhaps I felt that, if my mother could not go herself, then somehow I could find the place for her. Or perhaps I was hoping that, in some inexplicable way, I might meet her there. She liked the idea when I mentioned it, but could give me no hint of an address.
‘My memory is… gone, you know,’ she said.
Then she began telling stories about a garden with mangoes and a stream in it, a small house full of dogs and children, a wild hill growing with flowers and grasses.
From the nursing home room where she lay, you could see the syringa tree. Inside, the walls were filled with images of people, trees, houses, animals, and flowers, which the nurses had drawn. She would give them crayons, coloured pencils, and paper whenever they wanted them, and it got them drawing, many for the first time in their life. One of them told me, ‘We can breathe in here.’
Now she had given me a task too: to bring back a photograph and something growing, if
I ever found the house. All I had intended was a short journey to another province. But the force of my mother’s imagination made me feel like one who must cross over into a distant realm, make it through the mists and the mud of forgotten things, pass through dark forests, and return with something salvaged from the dead, and something living.
I must do this before it was too late. I still had no directions.