I JUST WANT TO HOLD MY MUM’S HAND.. WE’LL FIGHT ON
I get to see my mother through a window for 30 minutes, once a week.
I stand on the steps of a fire escape, often in pouring rain, trying to communicate through a window open barely a centimetre.
Dementia has diminished her voice to a whisper but even without words, she is still able to sense my sadness and tries to push a biscuit through the gap to make me smile. I want to touch her, hold her hand and breathe in her smell, the closeness that has helped us both so much during the last three years she’s battled Alzheimer’s disease.
Thousands of other families have endured this and much worse for the last seven months. I’d hoped a Sunday Mail campaign which resulted in Scottish Government guidance for inside care home visits from a family member might change things. But it’s clear we need legislation to make it happen. And fast.
The FM is right when she says Covid will pass, that by making sacrifices now, we’ll come out the other side. But the residents of care homes don’t have the luxury of time and neither do their families. The average time a person is in a home before they pass away is 24 months.
Holyrood has the power to make this law. To show the rest of the UK that for Scotland the saying “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members” holds dear.
The Sunday Mail will fight for those in care homes for whom Covid has all but destroyed the little life they have left. We said a few months ago: “You failed us on care home deaths – don’t fail on this.”