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.