Trying to Care

By William Wood

After a life overseas, William agrees to lend a hand to his ageing parents in their cottage in Kent. Both in their 90s, the couple’s initial frailty deteriorates into dementia and illness, and they are clearly unable to cope alone. Imperceptibly, William’s help turns into full-time caring as he moves in with them. At first, he has little understanding of their condition. He witnesses his ailing father’s dedication to an unappreciative wife of 70 years, while he does his best to keep them both fed and comfortable. His struggle is not without moments of humour and self-enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley
• Release date: Apr 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463559413

Book preview

About the author

William had led a nomadic life until retirement when gradually he found himself the full-time carer of two ailing nonagenarians. He became trapped 24/7 in the parental home in Kent trying to learn how physically and emotionally to care for a vulnerable but demanding couple. Putting his fiction writing on hold, he began to record four years of challenge, despair and sometimes humour. Since writing this book William has moved to Cumbria and a new life. He is currently back at work on his fiction and catching up on friends and family in France, Spain and Norway.

Dedication

To Anna

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Trying to Care

Published by Austin Macauley at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 William Wood

The right of William Wood to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with the written permission of the publisher, or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is

Available from the British Library.

www.austinmacauley.com

Trying to Care, .2018

ISBN 9781788485333 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781788485340 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781788485357 (E-Book)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.

First Published in 2018

AustinMacauley

CGC-33-01, 25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ

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Contents

Part One: A Month In 2007

Part Two: Further Stays in August 2007 and March 2008

Part Three: A Death and Permanent Residence

Part Four: Further Decline 2010

Part Five: Epilogue

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A Waiting Game

Both are awkward, stubborn, mostly uncomprehending

Mother blissful in dementia’s dangerous grip

Father over anxious, baffled, short of breath.

I try to care, I try to cope.

My task is living with this aged pair

Still together, married seventy of their ninety years

Demanding though they do not know it.

I try to care, I try to cope.

What’s the plan then? asks my mother

Apropos of nothing for the hundredth time.

I concoct another patient platitude

I try to care, I try to cope.

I’d rather not remember them like this

Though there are still traces

Of the parents I once knew, respected, even loved

I try to care, I try to cope.

In a burst of understanding and despair

I see the savage truth that my concern

Is not so much for them as for myself?

I try to cope, I try to care

I try to care

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Part One

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A Month in 2007

Friday, February 2

The endurance test has begun. It is just past ten on a dark, mild and muddy winter morning. I have driven over from home, unpacked my clothes and my food in the top rooms of Ethnam Cottage, the garret vacated at 5 am this morning by Stephen and Jennifer.

In the absence of my brother and sister-in-law, I am here to look after Mother and Father for a month. Old age is a cruel stage in one’s life. There is no peace of mind, no tranquillity, it seems, only anxiety and discomfort at best, fear and pain at worst. I hope my presence will help mitigate this condition.

Father is easily worried by change and confusion, and he has my sympathy. When Stephen decided to move in to help himself out of a tight corner and at the same time to keep an eye our parents, he began to claim the whole house and their lives. For a year they have had to tolerate building work and adapt to the presence of Stephen and Jennifer in the space that was their private preserve. Piles of Stephen’s junk overflow from all the rooms, from the garage which they have taken over and even fills the field that now resembles a tinkers’ tip.

More than anything else, Father is worried about Finn, the gentle and good-natured lurcher that Stephen did not have the heart to put into kennels while he is on holiday in New Zealand. I will be looking after him, though it is my parents I have come here for. There will be a dog walker three times a week, if Mother will allow it, to give me those afternoons off. (It has been family practice for as long as I can remember that afternoons are for walking the various dogs we have owned over the decades. A dog walk has to be at least four miles long and preferably cover the muddiest and brambliest tracts of land available.) Finn is Stephen’s dog, but Mother thinks she is his and that she still takes him out, though in reality neither Mother nor Father can walk more than a few hundred yards.

Father is breathless, deaf and in pain, yet he gamely tries to carry on, chopping firewood, digging in the garden and doing more than his fair share of the household chores. He ministers to Mother’s demands and waits on her around the clock without complaint. He gets nothing in return: no sympathy, no understanding, and no thanks. Nagging criticism is his only reward.

It is difficult to gauge Mother’s state of mind. She can fool casual visitors with her small talk but could not tell them what day or even what month it is, or what she did this morning. She has asked me three times in half an hour what we are doing for lunch. She has remarked half a dozen times how dark it is. It is as though her mind switched off about ten years ago. Talk about anything before that and she is alert.

A woman came to deliver frozen meals. The freezer is full of food, some of it made up, which has been there for ages. Sausages, haddock, a pie, some fruit. It was difficult to find room for these new supplies. Although I will be doing my own cooking, it is clear I shall have also to supervise theirs, particularly as we must share the kitchen.

Father has gone to the doctor to talk about his dry mouth which prevents him from sleeping. He has driven himself to the surgery. I am not sure that at the age of 86, deaf and unable to turn his neck, he should be out on the road. However, living as remote as this, the loss of his car would be a real deprivation.

He returns from the surgery very deflated. The doctor had not given him any medication to help his dry mouth but wanted him to return on Monday for a nasal swab and then to see an ENT specialist. So, on top of cardiologists and urologists, there are further consultants to see and more uncomfortable nights sleeping sitting up in a chair.

At 1 pm, the dog walker fails to turn up. I telephone the number left by my brother, but it does not exist. It is a mobile number and the dog walker’s name does not appear in the phone book. I take Finn out myself. It is a spring-like day, warm and sunny. We see a fox in the middle of a field. Finn is interested in the manner of a naturalist observing familiar animal behaviour but does not want to pursue it.

I go home, work, write and have supper with my wife Anna. She is continuing to live at home because it is easier for her to get to work from there. I return to my cell in the evening, watch a bit of TV with Mother and Father, take Finn out, settle the parents and go to bed.

The first day is over, the moon is full, owls are screeching. All is still and quiet.

Saturday, February 3

A cold, frosty and sunny morning. I coax Finn from Mother and Father’s bed while they sleep on. I take the dog round the field, bring in the milk that is deposited at the gate and have my breakfast. Father comes down and goes out in the cold to feed the birds. This is an extravagant process during which he strews most of yesterday’s loaf and a large amount of peanuts around the garden. When this is complete, he makes tea and takes it up to Mother. He dresses and gets their breakfast things together while Mother eventually dresses and comes down to be waited upon.

I go into the next village of Hawkhurst to do some chores. When I return with the papers, Mother and Father are finishing breakfast. Father’s deaf aid has packed up. Without it, he is stone deaf but does manage to convey that he did manage to sleep all night in the bed.

I spend the rest of the morning spreading compost on a vegetable patch and then saw up logs for the fire. Father is making a boot rack, one of his own design and a typically Heath Robinson affair. It will be interesting to see how it shapes up. I am sure it will cost more in materials than it would to buy one off the peg.

Mother and Father make an unnecessary trip into the village to buy things they will not eat. The only thing they need and might consume is fruit. Before they leave, Mother asks over and over again, What are we going to get? If Father hears, he replies, I don’t know. You do the cooking.

I defrost sausages and beans for their supper and remind Mother of the tons of potatoes she has already peeled. Again and again I have to remind her that I am doing my own cooking.

After lunch, I take Finn by car to Hempstead Forest. He does not like the place, so I have to drag him along on the lead all the time. This partially comforts him. He is nervous on unfamiliar territory, though I know Stephen sometimes brings him here. After the tea ritual, which Father can manage, I take a break until it is time to prepare my supper and help Mother with hers. She still thinks not only that she does it all herself but also that she is entertaining me. After supper, we sit around the fire and watch TV.

Toby, Stephen’s son, telephones. He and Iwona, his Polish girlfriend, are moving from Tunbridge Wells to Hastings and until their new flat is ready, he wants to move in here and dump all his belongings somewhere. They are always in a muddle, Toby often out of work and for ever in debt, Iwona changing jobs weekly; they have no understanding of the strain another invasion will place on Mother and Father. Indeed, where will Toby and Iwona put their stuff and where will they sleep, eat, live? How long is a few days?

Trying to discuss this rationally with Mother and Father is difficult. Father does not hear and if he does, forgets any decision he has leapt to or he changes his mind anyway. Mother forgets even more quickly, often after a few sentences. She asked me six times in five minutes if I wanted a sweet. She cannot understand why I do not eat certain things, why Finn needs a dog walker, what I am doing here. To explain even for the umpteenth time is pointless. There will be umpteen more repetitions to cover the same questions.

Early this morning I heard on radio 4 news about an outbreak of bird ‘flu’ among Bernard Matthew’s turkeys in Suffolk. I told Father, There’s been an outbreak of bird ‘flu’ in Suffolk.

Eh?

I repeat the information twice more but still he does not hear it. Then Mother says, There’s been an outbreak of bird ‘flu’ in Suffolk he is saying.

Father looks quite baffled. We’re having bird food for supper?

Sunday, February 4

My day began at 3.15 am. After a day of headaches yesterday, I awoke to a full-scale migraine in the early hours and between 3 and 7.30 am was running shuttle to the lavatory, cat napping and listening to the radio. In between all the problems of coping with Mother and Father, the dog and the builders who Stephen arranged to come during his own absence preyed on my mind, assuming huge proportions as these things do in the early hours of winter mornings. I cannot, for example, stay ill in bed next week because the plumbers are arriving to put pipes through the ceiling in preparation for the solar panels. I also have to be at my own house to take delivery of a gate I have ordered, not to mention the routine banking and shopping to do. More immediately, for today is Sunday, how am I going to drive Mother and Father home to our house for the Sunday lunch Anna has prepared and to which we are all invited?

Have to get up at 7.30 to take Finn out before breakfast. He gets very excited in the garden and in the wood pile across the lane. At first, he is convinced there is something beneath the summerhouse, and then he sniffs out something else between the heap of timber and laths in the field. Since the laths are full of rusty nails, I drag him off.

Being first down in the morning, I draw the curtains to let some light in. It recalls early childhood and mother’s rituals. As a young woman, she came lightly into the bedroom and pulled aside the curtains, flooding the house with summer sunshine. In our (children’s) bedroom, there were also heavy wooden shutters to open. Now at 86, she still draws the curtains shut at night even in rooms they do not use, upstairs and downstairs. It is not as if there were any neighbours or passers-by. In the morning the house is wrapped in heavy darkness until she gets up and draws the curtains back.

Trying to fight migraine and nausea, I shift more logs and stack them close to the house. Then I cut up some branches. Father potters out, looks in the compost bin and spots all the rotten apples I threw out yesterday. He gets distressed and tries to salvage some good ones. They are all thoroughly rotten, brown and squashy. He and Mother have never liked waste, prompting me to write this poem:

Windfalls

Waste not, want not, eat up the windfalls first.

So they placed fallen peaches on the window sill to ripen,

Nibbled one side of bruised eating apples,

Cut rot from cookers, cored and sliced them for the freezer,

Wiped the slugs from wizened pears, quartered quinces,

Bottled bloated plums, always saving windfalls first.

But the good fruit ripened faster, dropped and rotted

In its turn. This fall of blemished fruit

This shower of imperfection so abounded

That they had no time to suck, to savour a warm ripe peach

Bite an apple such as Eve would offer, a sun-drenched pear

Intact from tooth of wasp and blow fly’s eggs.

Perfection they never tasted.

Mother has come up in purple stains on her wrists and her eyes are inflamed. Dressed in an unbuttoned, dirty red dress, she looks a wreck. Father, apart from his breathlessness and deafness, is quite active in his way.

Anna and I walk Finn locally and catch up on one another’s news. Mother and Father potter up the lane and we all meet up again for tea. Then I return with Mother and Father to their home.

Typical of Father’s muddle is the struggle to get the wheelie bin out in the road for the dustmen. He keeps it behind his garage. To get it out into the road today meant moving his car with all the wheezing and groaning this entails, dislodging a week’s offcuts from Father’s carpentry projects and other debris from the path and negotiating an obstacle course of sticks and pots. I suggested he parked the bin inside the gate to avoid this weekly challenge.

It’s too far to go, he said, meaning from the kitchen. In point of fact, the distance from kitchen to gate is the same as that between kitchen and garage. The advantage of keeping the bin by the gate is glaring.

Monday, February 5

Sleep right through to 7.30 and wake migraine free. Amazing! Take Finn out and have breakfast with Mother and Father. Father shuffles around preparing orange juice, coffee, toast and cereals and mother arrives at the table in time to criticise: the wrong size knife, lack of butter etc. Father surreptitiously slips her pills into her coffee and gives her other capsules to take.

What’s wrong with me? she demands.

Where do I start? I reply. I take a day away from the asylum and have lunch and supper with Anna. Unfortunately, the dog walker again fails to materialise. Father takes Finn around the field. It was precisely to avoid this exertion and to give me time away that the dog walker was hired in the first place. On my return in the evening, I contact the alternative dog walker. I leave Mother and Father watching the 10 o’clock news at painful decibels and retire to bed.

Tuesday, February 6

Woke at 3.15 am and was unable to get back to sleep. Unsettled stomach and unsettled mind. All problems of the moment: Rachel is back at home and unwell; the dog walker is missing; the alternative dog walker seems unsuitable; the possibility of feckless Toby and chaotic Iwona descending; the arrival of the builders who need the run of the whole house. All this seemed insurmountable in the early hours.

I listened to the BBC World Service as I could not sleep. I wondered whether the original dog walker, one of Stephen’s bargains, had simply been casing the joint, because thanks to Stephen’s briefing and a trial walk with him, he knows Mother and Father’s habits and vulnerability. Was he perhaps a criminal intent on a break-in? Probably not, but in the small hours I wondered about getting the police to trace him. But no offence has yet been committed.

One of the frustrations is that, his memory apart, it is impossible to discuss anything with Father on a rational basis because of his deafness. He is an intelligent man, but communication is reduced to shouting key phrases at him. Even asking a simple question is a hit and miss affair. Last night, I found scaffolding up the house. It must have been erected while I was out. Father had not thought to mention it, did not know when it had been done or when the builders would be returning to install the solar panels.

Last night I gave Mother and Father a short article I had written for a magazine. It was about rural communities and I thought they might have had an opinion on it. They both read the article and put it aside to pick up their books which they may or may not have already read last week or last month. Did they agree with my article, I asked. Father reminisced a bit about his youth, but neither of them was, or to be fair, ever had been, really capable of critical or analytical thought, Mother because she has no formal education, Father because his medical education and practice never involved writing essays, engaging in debate or abstract thought.

The doorbell rings. Two men have come to install the solar panels. They have a large van, so I have to move my car. Shortly afterwards, the plumber comes. All this was meant to be phased. Fortunately, we are all up and dressed. I set to emptying the airing cupboard, clearing the top bedroom (where I live and sleep) and allowing the men the run of the house. Finn the watchdog sleeps on in Mother and Father’s bed, unconcerned by the intruders. The plumber is a big, cheerful man.

While two men are thumping on the roof, the plumber is working in the bathroom and doors open and close all over the house, Finn remains in Mother and Father’s bed, his head now resting on the pillow; the cat, equally unperturbed, sleeps on in the bath.

The phone rings. How much else can happen? It is the psychiatric social worker who wants to make an appointment with Mother. She should, or Father should have applied for a home help grant and have contacted various agencies, so someone can come and help. Father has taken no action even if he promised to because (a) he can’t cope with the telephone and (b) Mother refuses to accept any help, content as she is with Father being her slave. Mother, as usual, is the problem. When confronted, she is proud of being difficult, or as she calls it, independent. She discounts a husband who is wearing himself out and two sons always there in support.

The plumber wants to turn off the heating and the water. Fortunately, at 5 °C, it is not too cold a day for February. Anyway, Mother and Father go out shopping for screws, salad dressing and a newspaper. The solar panel men finish. Only the plumber and I are left in the house.

At lunch time, Valerie, the reserve dog walker, arrives. She is a noisy, dumpy woman with a greyhound bitch of her own in tow. The dogs exchange greetings and then ignore one another. My aim is to show Valerie the walks we do but her town-bred greyhound cannot manage the gates and stiles that Finn simply leaps. Our lurcher can clear a five-bar gate from a standing position. We abort the walk. Valerie suggests coming to pick Finn up in her car and walking him back at her home where there are no gates or stiles. She is not, it seems to me, much of a walker herself. I wonder whether the missing dog walker will ever show up.

In the evening, I drive the parents to my home for a meal cooked by Anna and I check my own mail and email. Mother’s refrain today has been, What day is it tomorrow? When told that it is Wednesday, she says, That’s good, so it’s not the fish man then. She has also taken to asking me, Where are you sleeping? I tell her I am in the top and she suggests I move down to the spare room, inches deep in grime and dog hair with a feeble shower in the en-suite bathroom and a cold water tap that hardly flows. Nothing will budge me from the top flat, my self-contained retreat.

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Wednesday, February 7

Very cold night. Beautiful cold and frosty morning, Ethnam Lane itself a sheet of ice. Father pootles about with breakfast, and just as Mother comes down, he shuffles off into the garden with a kettle of hot water to break the ice for the birds. He is gone ages. Mother becomes disoriented; their toast and coffee cools. I report on Finn’s bowels and prepare for the plumber.

Dash out to do essential shopping, lay the fire at home for Anna who is at work, turn out all the lights she has left on and return in time for Mother and Father to go to the optician. Mother cannot find her glasses, Father quietly does his nut and they leave twenty minutes late for their appointment.

The plumber calls to say he has crashed his van on the way and cannot get to work today. Instead, two young men come to assess the work and promise to return tomorrow. So, another day without use of the spare room and airing cupboard. And to boot, I have to move tons of Stephen’s mystic books and pamphlets to allow for the pipes.

Valerie turns up with her partner, so he can lift their dog over the stiles. Very cold but sunny. Both dogs chase squirrels and rabbits. Finn can keep up with the greyhound even though she was supposed to have been a champion in her day. As I suspected, however, Valerie is not a walker and cannot keep up. She does try. Two stone lighter, she might actually enjoy a country ramble. I doubt whether she will ever be able to walk Finn without my company which is, after all, the object of the exercise.

In the evening, I prepare Mother and Father’s food and mine and we spend the evening around the fire trying to read our books between Mother’s repeated questions and remarks. It is now very cold out.

Thursday, February 8

After a cold night and a moderate snowfall, I take Finn out to a grey pre-breakfast walk. The snow is already dripping heavily from the branches and the lane is slush. Provided it does not freeze, road transport is no problem. The radio is predictably describing ‘chaos’, schools are closing, rail services of course are disrupted and airports are closed. There is no excuse for this. The snow was predicted.

Father, undaunted by the weather, is still fiddling about with