Late August 2024: An Adventure Before Dementia part 2

‘How’s your cognition?’

My mother-in-law didn’t know how to answer the assistant manager’s question. Well, you wouldn’t really at 95 – nor might you at 45. At this point of her induction to her new care home on the Wednesday morning, the second and final Wednesday of our mission of mercy to England, her favourite son-in-law, her only son-in-law, stepped in to offer a translation. The Outlaw managed to answer satisfactorily. That’s to say, she wasn’t completely dotty yet. Judging by the comportment of some of the other residents, she soon might be.

The previous Wednesday, the Good Wife and I had managed with Jim’s help down the road to get her out of her giant reclining armchair and into a wheelchair and then lift her in said chair down the front steps and kind of slide her into the passenger seat of the hire-Merc without incident. Once she was safely buckled in, we set off for the care home: a preliminary visit to see whether she would approve of the place and agree to a move to what we all secretly hoped would be (quite soon) her final resting place.

We went via the nearby army target range. During the first week of our visit, I remember hearing the apparent sound of my printer cleaning itself – as it does sometimes. Since the printer was at home in France, I was probably mistaken. It was only later on that someone in the village mentioned that the Ukranian troops were out on the range practising warfare. That Wednesday, though, the guns were quiet and the red flag was furled. We passed a house with no windows, presumably used for exercises. Perhaps if the care home didn’t work out… I speculated silently.

In fact, she loved the place. She was greeted outside the front door by an old friend from up the road, who was now a permanent resident following her abduction by the fairies. In the past, the neighbourhood travelling coiffeuse had cut their hair together in my mother-in-law’s stifling sitting room, so it was nice to think that they might quite soon renew this practical relationship. The staff seemed friendly and attentive, the manager (a tattooed ex-Commando) clearly ran a happy ship and if the room he took us to see was rather small, there would be another rather bigger room currently being refurbished that would be ready for her next week. All seemed suddenly well with the world; there was light at the end of a very long tunnel.

One week on, a week of shopping for anticipated essentials, labelling and packing of clothes, sourcing a basic mobile phone and such like, I followed George up to her new room at the end of the first-floor corridor while Debs and her mother Mary answered questions on care and cognition. George led me through a kind of secondary day room where an old guy who used to sing country & western sat listening to Waylon Jennings all day long. ‘All right, Bob?’ George asked cheerily. ‘Help!’ moaned Bob. An adjacent catatonic old woman said nothing. I could hear the faint ring of alarm bells in my head.

The refurbished room was not that much bigger than the room we’d seen the week before: a single bed, a sub-Ikea wardrobe and chest-of-drawers, an armchair, a tiny table on wheels and an even tinier en suite bathroom. By the time we’d deposited the Outlaw’s impedimenta, it seemed not much bigger than a prison cell. A very expensive prison cell. But there was a nice view of the woods outside and a colony of rabbits hopping around the perimeter lawn. There were resident red squirrels, too, George assured me. Later, once we’d parked our charge in her armchair, it was painfully clear that her angle of repose wouldn’t allow her to see either rabbits or squirrels.

We returned the next day, once we’d done the deed. That day was the worst of the fortnight: we had an appointment at the local vet’s for 11 o’clock. For whom the bell tolls… Giving Omar his final breakfast before the meeting with his Maker, I felt like Albert Pierrepoint, the last British executioner – except this wasn’t simply a job, it felt like murder. As hard as we tried, we couldn't equate the picture of Omar fighting for his breath the previous week prior to his steroid injection, with this beautiful tabby cat, rescued from near death, so plush and seemingly healthy. The vet, one of many fine Cumbrian country people I met, administered the lethal dose, while stroking the poor innocent cat till his heart beat its last. It was worse even than the night when our local vet did the same for our Labradoid, Alfred Lord Sampson. He was old and suffering; he had to go. And as bad as the time I had to despatch a dying robin with a stone, or the morning on the way to Martel when I witnessed a young terrified deer being hit by a car.

When we arrived at the care home and delivered the news to the Outlaw, she appeared to react a little like Lady Macbeth. The deed was done; no need to dwell on it. I'm not without compassion: her life is no life at all and she's asked many a time for a lethal injection (when not threatening to slit her throat or jump in the river), but there’s a hard and ruthless streak to my mother-in-law that even her beloved André Rieu has never mollified. It probably keeps her ranting and raging against the dying of the light, rather than going gently. This is the woman who despatched both her daughters to boarding school at age 11 and figuratively threw away the key. The same one who wrote my bride-to-be a poisoned pen letter on the eve of her wedding, highlighting the dangers of hitching her wagon to a worthless favourite son-in-law.

Debs puts it down to a rich seam of jealousy. The previous weekend we’d witnessed it at work during a visit from one of her many attentive friends: when the conversation gravitated away from mother and towards daughter. She started to throw a wobbly – complete with fidgeting, closed eyes and laboured breathing – and attentive friend was advised to leave. I’d witnessed something similar the previous Christmas and was a little alarmed, but my wife is wise to her mother’s wiles. It was just a comédie, as they say in France.

To where we returned that weekend, with relief and some misgivings, since after all the place did appear to be a business-class Bedlam. We got back to a burning-hot Paris at the tail-end of the final day of the Olympic festivities. Our Eurostar was cancelled once more, just to round off the trip neatly, but once more they got us onto an earlier train and we arrived in Brive at midnight to find the dog and daughter waiting on the platform.

Any sense, though, that our mission of mercy might have resulted in a done deal has been subsequently scuppered. The transition has been… to use the euphemism of positive thinkers the world over, ‘challenging’. There were 22 calls one Sunday from her easy-to-use (easy-to-abuse) mobile phone. ‘Would you please phone George and tell him that they’ve forgotten the sugar in my tea again.’ ‘Mum… Mum… Mum! Listen please, it’s the weekend. George isn’t there…’ George is beginning to spot the difference between the sweet old lady whom he assessed initially as potentially perfect for the home, and the fire-breathing, finger-snapping sociopathic monster she can become when people don't dance to her tune. He and the Good Wife have started co-counselling each other. Nevertheless, George has 'advised' her that the Outlaw's behaviour has been so bad that they might have to ask her to leave.

Nothing winds my wife up like a sense of entitlement and the behaviour that goes with it. She was so incensed by her mother's insensitive complaints about never being so miserable in her life to her former neighbour and unsung national treasure, who still works for a living at 80-plus, who still cuts her own firewood with a chainsaw, so incensed that she knocked off a severe e-mail to be printed by George and deposited in her ladyship's room. Her comportment was considerably better the next day.

Of course, there are two sides to every story. It has taken three weeks to sort out her incontinence pads and for several days she was without soap in her bathroom. When you're paying six grand or so per month, you have a right to expect a better service. The fact that she doesn't receive it suggests that they're probably under-staffed. If they found the extra bodies, no easy task, the fees would be even higher. The shortcomings are no doubt par for the course; western society's treatment of its old people is generally quite shocking. Help! indeed.

Meanwhile, life is currently on hold – we can't make any hard-and-fast arrangements lest we are summoned back over the water to come and collect a banished resident and her baggage – but there have been a few promising developments. The other night, for example, the Outlaw was able to laugh about a visit from a fellow resident, a former vicar apparently, who started removing his pyjamas. My guess is that it was the well-spoken man who greets all passers-by with a cheery cod-Yorkshireman's ay-oop. My mother-in-law managed to send him packing before anything unseemly occurred. It is, as she chuckled, Bedlam.

But what to do? My brother recommends a hired assassin and a friend has offered us a burial plot in her garden. And I guess if all else fails, there is always that home, home on the [firing] range.

 

August 2024: An Adventure Before Dementia pt 1

Any trip to the UK is a bit of an adventure for the reluctant traveller that I have become. This one was doubly so. Our mission, impossible to refuse – to stand in for my mother-in-law’s principal carer for two daunting weeks while she was on holiday in Norway– was cloaked in symbolic significance: we travelled out on the day that the Paris Olympics started and we travelled back on the day that they finished. Both times our Eurostar was cancelled. On the day of an opening ceremony that featured a resuscitated Céline Dion, sabotage made mayhem at the Gare du Nord. Though the slashed cables were duly repaired in good time for the closing ceremony, our train was cancelled for no evident reason. On both occasions, the staff pulled out all the stops to get us onto an earlier train. Thank heavens for the paranoia that dictates we turn up considerably earlier than the majority of travellers.

Since the train was re-routed on local lines, we arrived at St. Pancras over an hour later than our original, later train was due. But we still had half an hour before our ‘Azuma’ was due to speed us to Leeds. ‘See it, say it, sorted’, as they drum into UK rail passengers. From Leeds, the magnificent Settle/Carlisle line took us over the Yorkshire Dales and some of the most stunning scenery in England, this time – unlike our Yuletide trip to Skipton – the landscape was bathed in balmy sunshine.

At Garston station, a big colourful sign advertises the scenic splendours of a branch line that takes you to Morecambe Bay and on, if you’re daft enough, to Barrow-in-Furness. They call it the Bentham Line; maybe (I’m guessing) it has something to do with the philanthropic 19^th century industrialist. What you really need to know is that the Bentham Line is ‘dementia friendly’. Perhaps because we’d been up since 4am and/or had a surfeit of stress and travel-tension to release, this nugget of information caused us to giggle like school kids. Did this friendliness towards people with dementia suggest that other lines would refuse to transport them? Or did the line recruit them in the way that B&Q recruits people past retirement age? If the latter, it would be more a matter of ‘See it, say it, but just don’t expect our staff to sort it.’

On timely arrival at Appleby station, there was Jack from the Temple Sowerby garage with our hire car for the fortnight. My canny wife has been using them ever since she discovered that they’re half as expensive and offer twice the customer-care as the hire-car giants. We had a Mercedes saloon. ‘Oh Lord, won’t you rent me a Mer-ced-es Benz.’ I’ve never driven a Merc before – and very nice to drive it was, too, once I’d learnt to use a handbrake located just under the steering wheel. The first car, too, that I’d driven with a sixth gear. The trouble was that it was so brand-spanking-new and Cumbrian roads are so narrow and so full of blind bends that every sortie was a journey into fear.

Sleeping soundly in our small-but-somewhat-imperfectly formed Airbnb haven from Purgatory further up the road, little did we guess just how apt that dementia-friendly tag would prove. We were woken early the next morning by a call from a carer to say that the Outlaw had had another fall. Debs threw on her clothes to race up the road and speak to the ambulance crew. I arrived a little later, just before they departed, leaving the neighbours with plenty of food for speculation. In fact, the old dear wasn’t badly hurt. But both ambulance crew and a little later the community care doctor (masked and protected from head to foot by non-degradable plastic) agreed that this situation couldn’t go on. My mother-in-law needed full-time care and not just four visits from carers per day backed up by countless phone calls to her distant daughter. This was music to the ears of said daughter since Part 1 of our mission of mercy was to get an obdurate accident-prone nonagenarian into the Merc and off to Kirkby Stephen for a pre-arranged visit to a prospective care-home.

While the Good Wife administered daily care to a woman who would, as my mother used to tell us kids, ‘try the patience of a saint’, my support role was that of shopper, principal driver, cook, domestic and a shoulder to scream on. As the Outlaw’s favourite son-in-law (her only son-in-law), I could do no wrong. I’m a man, so someone to women of her generation to be served and revered. On presenting the meals I prepared with such care in her ill-equipped and insanitary kitchen, my aged fan would instantly shake salt and squeeze tomato ketchup all over my creations with the impatience of someone killing a fly that refused to die. I tried not to take it to heart.

The post-meridian became our golden time of day. Once our charge was settled and sleeping after lunch in her enormous all-singing all-dancing armchair, we could walk up the Fell-side if it wasn’t raining to gaze upon the Eden Valley in all its topographical glory. And we could feed a carrot to Tony the faux zebra, alone in his field. A shaggy black Fell pony festooned for some strange reason in a stripy jacket, Tony proved a most amiable creature. We could tell him our woes while he stood stoically, resting his head on the gate. On other days, we could head west in the Merc on the A66 to Penrith for some shopping for she-who-must-be-obeyed. After which I would be excused to go back to our lodgings to work on a commissioned article, do a spot of constricted yoga and prepare supper for my homecoming saint.

We had one whole day off. Despite the ominous sky, we took a trip through the glorious West Lakeland hills to the unremarkable Cumbrian coast. The wife needed some sea air and we had promised ourselves some freshly caught fish and chips. At Maryport, a drab little town that has seen better days, we came upon a white van bearing the legend ‘On an adventure before dementia’. We laughed our legs off, though subsequently discovered that it was old-hat, proof if needed that the expatriate’s lot is to be forever slightly out of touch. Further up the coast in Silloth, a broken coffee machine spared us an uncommonly expensive diversion at Mrs. Wilson’s Tea Room. We spent the money we saved on fish and chips – not the best in the county, but the seagulls enjoyed some of the oily undercooked chips. Wonderful the way the seasoned pros were able to swoop and catch a discarded chip in mid air.

Such is the dizzy entertainment to be found in Cumbria. While the rest of the country was focused on fascist riots in outposts of civilisation like Hartlepool, or on the Olympics in Paris, or Trump’s latest gaffs, or the war in Ukraine, the front page of the weekend Cumberland & Westmorland Herald was describing unprovoked attacks by seagulls in the centre of Penrith, while its cultural supplement carried an article about the Matterdale Paris(h) Olympics. Now that’s what I call real news.

Despite the goings-on in Purgatory, I found myself falling a little in love with Cumbria. The scenery is God’s own and the country people, for all their political proclivities and undoubted support for Brexit, are as kind and as helpful and friendly as their accents are musical. As an alien from France, however, my impression of Penrith, supposedly the gateway to the Lakes, was coloured by charity shops full of old Jim Reeves and Perry Como records and a town centre dominated by unsuitable young mothers, decaying old people on mobility scooters and a conglomerate of the heavily tattooed and shockingly overweight. There is, too, the metropolis of Carlisle at the end of the railway line and I was thinking of going there to check out the local record shops, but I decided that I needed more records like a hole in the head and that the city would probably depress me further. I need a nearby town in my life that I can learn to love and currently can accept no substitute for Brive.

The pace quickened after the disturbing reports of seagull bombardments. The Outlaw’s beloved cat, Omar, whom she took in just after COVID when he was at death’s door, became seriously ill one evening, fighting for his breath like an asthmatic. My wife, the therapist, calmed him with a drop or two of lavender essential oil, but when we took him in to the local vet for his monthly injection, the vet explained that his lungs had probably been permanently damaged by whatever virus had nearly killed him. Effectively, we were keeping him going from one month to the next by an injection of steroids and, in view of the likely upheaval to come and the extreme difficulty of finding someone to take him on willing to shell out £80 each month, maybe the most humane thing to do would be to put him to sleep. Debs told the vet that her mother had often said the same thing about herself. It was difficult to gauge how that one went down.

When we reported back to the Outlaw, it was as if the barrier to her moving had been suddenly lifted: We would put Omar to sleep, cremate him and scatter his ashes over her designated burial plot, and she would move to the care-home where she would receive 24-hour care and everything would be tickety-boo. But guess which cat-loving couple would have the task of escorting this beautiful cat to Death Row.

Find out more in the second part of this missive from Oop North. Learn how our intrepid pair of stand-in carers would deliver their charge to her ruinously expensive new home, breathe a collective sigh of relief and then bear the burden of guilt all the way back home to France…