1995, Prestbury, Gloucestershire, England

By Teresa Hewitt

The toddler’s reins were tightly wrapped around my wrist as I pushed Pa’s wheelchair onto the pedestrian crossing, calling back to encourage Laddy to step onto the road beside me. Laddy didn’t want to cross the road; she didn’t see the point. She didn’t see the point of anything much by this stage. She stood teetering on the kerb, smiling sweetly as the cars began to gather speed and roar past.

Safely on the other side with only two of my charges I looked around wildly for help, found that as usual we were invisible, put the brake on the wheelchair, told Pa to stay put, and snatched up the toddler as I ran back across the road. By this time Laddy was hitching up her skirt, pulling down her knickers, and preparing to pee on the pavement. That got attention all right, but still no help.

The toddler wriggled and yelled in my arms as I struggled to get Laddy’s knickers up, and then, just to make everything really perfect, from across the road I heard a muffled shout – Pa had tried to get out of the wheelchair and fallen. He lay there on his back, legs flailing, brandishing his stick and shouting loudly, a noisy, stranded beetle waiting for me to come and haul him to his feet.

That’s a snapshot from my life 15 years go, when I lived and dealt with the idiosyncracy of dementia on a daily basis. Not the worst moment, just the one I remember most clearly, and it always makes me smile - one of the few funny memories.

Those years were a time of broken nights, broken days, watching these broken people crumble messily away. It hadn’t always been like this. My parents-in-law had sold their house when we sold ours, and we had all moved together into a large farmhouse in a village on the outskirts of the Cotswolds. It had lots of advantages for all of us, and we lived side by side for a decade, a little bumpily at times but happily enough. Then things started to change.

It began in small ways. My mother-in-law Laddy, a stalwart of the local WI, began to do some very strange things. I met her one night sailing up the stairs with the telephone wrapped securely in a towel.

“To keep it safe,” she said mysteriously. “My choir ladies tell me that this house gets calls at night from men –“ she lowered her voice – “wanting sex, you know.”

Things began to disappear. Laddy would ask me most reasonably, most insistently, to return the things I’d stolen from her room. Clothes mostly: she was sure I was taking her clothes. I would find the missing items in her room, but if I’d thought that would set the record straight I was wrong, as I was going to be wrong a thousand more times about the power of reason to defeat the delusions of dementia.

“But it was under your bed, Laddy. You must have put it there to keep it safe.”

“So that’s where you hid it! But why do you keep doing it, my dear? You can get help for these things, you know,” Laddy said sweetly, twisting things around so neatly it left no room for reasonable debate.

Many of her preoccupations were to do with sex, which was odd from this dignified, prim lady in her 70s. In Laddy’s normal days you would have bet money that coupling never crossed her mind, but now it rose to the fore with a vengeance as if it had been hotly bubbling away for years. There were men around who wanted sex – hundreds of them. Someone in this house was encouraging them to call and ask for it. It was not her – therefore it must be the only other female in the house – her daughter-in-law, the harlot!

Worn down by the bizarre catalog of accusations I appealed first to Pa, who would wave his stick around angrily and say nothing at all, and then to my husband, who was inclined to think I was exaggerating. This was perhaps the most soul-destroying stage: when Laddy would accuse me of nasty acts from petty theft to running a brothel in my bedroom, while continuing to present a rational, normal demeanor to the outside world.

This cunning in dementia patients is common as they fight to preserve their facade and hide their panic at their dim realization that their minds are going wrong, and it wasn’t personal, though it was hard not to take it so. What relief, what selfish, shameful relief I felt when Laddy started to let her paranoia slip out through the cracks!

There were men hiding in the trees and watching her at night: the police were called. A whole family living in her fridge worried her greatly: they must be cold in there, one or two of them looked ill or even dead, and they refused to answer her when she tried to coax them out. Potatoes were still peeled in her attempts to stick to the mealtime routines of half a century, but they were plunked on Pa’s plate raw. She began to pay less attention to hygiene, and at times, frankly reeked.

All this time in the first few years she was still maintaining a normal life, attending her choirs and meetings, but gradually her bemused friends drifted away and she was left to pace the house restlessly, night and day, up the stairs, along the corridors, turning around at the furthest point to retrace her steps, on some mission only she understood.

Meanwhile Pa had a second major stroke, which robbed him of a little more speech, a little more mobility. His mind stayed sharp; but he blanked out quite successfully the rotting away of his wife’s brain and refused to confront it. An appearance of normality had to be kept up, hence the twice-weekly shopping trips where I would take them out for a little break, landing me in the sort of mess that starts this tale.

Although it was I who was by now their full-time caregiver, my husband didn’t escape: one nightmare trip to one of our daughter’s concerts ended with him racing down the motorway, Laddy threatening throughout to open the car door and jump out, anything to get away from the son who had turned into a malevolent abductor. The puddle of wee in the car seat was the least of his problems that night.

By this time we were getting help: a weekly bath for each of them, Meals-on-Wheels occasionally, but it didn’t seem much. Our district nurse, a feisty Irish lady, was a gem, bringing me Laddy-sized nappies, which helped a lot, except for those occasions when Laddy would strip them off and smear her mess around. That house had acres of carpet; I knew every inch of it close-up from the marathon scrubbing sessions that took place at least once a week. You wouldn’t believe how far one person’s shit can go when it’s squashed between toes and tramped all over the house.

In desperation, we tried locking Laddy into her bedroom, but then she banged to be let out, shouted, paced, desperate to get back to her roaming and smearing. It was not a normal life for any of us, especially the children, one a teen who got no peace at nights, one not much more than a baby with her own needs clashing with those of the two adult-sized babies who now ruled the house. For an unbelievable five years we lived this way.

Then it began to end.

Pa, trapped in the living hell of a keen brain in a useless body, died suddenly in the hospital. Laddy’s brain turned gradually to mush and she became a sweet old thing whose plight tugged at my heart. She seemed to love me now, her face lighting up when I entered the room, smiling at me, reaching out to stroke my hair with a clawed hand crusted in her own dirt as I washed her, talked to her, reassured her. She lived in a dream from which she would never wake, sitting by her window looking out, talking to those men in the trees. I remember the despair and terror I felt when one day I placed a morsel of bread in her mouth and she sat there smiling with her tongue sticking out, not knowing what to do with it. She had forgotten how to eat, and died quietly 11 days later in her own bed four months after Pa, and never knew she’d been bereaved. A long, sad, messy end to both their lives.

If this sounds like a tale of unremitting gloom, it wasn’t all that way. There was love and laughter there as well as muck and tears. I miss those old people of mine, every one of them. I’d bring them all back, if I could, and try again. I’d do it better this time. Lay linoleum, not carpets, from the start.

Teresa Hewitt is a mother-of-two, living in the rural Cotswolds, England. She writes stories for women’s magazines and has also written a humorous book about pony owning, currently being considered by a publisher.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, March 16th, 2007 | Email This Post

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