Today, I found my mum sat in the dining room on her own, looking down at her hands, but dressed and clean. It was a very sad feeling finding her in that way but when she saw me she immediately recognised me and said something quite ordinary, as though I had simply popped out to do some shopping or had come home from work. She showed no signs of distress but I saw how thinner she has become and much 'older'. She even mentioned my wife's name out of the blue, and my sister's name too, but only the one time. She also mentioned dad and I wonder what might be going through her broken mind about him.
It's a curious thing to sit there, with a pleasant tune playing on the radio in the background and the sun coming through, the tables and chairs neatly laid out, pretty pictures on the walls and a cheery message on the whiteboard with the day and date written on it with smiley faces, while down the corridor somewhere in someone's room another resident is screaming and wailing while the staff no doubt do their best to deliver some personal care. I'm not sure if mum heard it herself but she didn't react to it.
Later on, another resident was heard coming down the corridor, in one of the distressed states I've witnessed before. This time though she wasn't calling out for her husband, but instead got to the end of the corridor and to the doorway that leads to the main entrance area of the building and began hammering on the door and walls, crying out for someone to help her and to be let out. Mum didn't seemed phased by this either. Even one of the other residents, a quiet old chap who I've often seen walking around with not a lot of clothes on, the poor bugger, was not far away and her telling her to shut her cake hole and go to her room. He even turned to me at one point and said She's a nutter.
You couldn't make it up. As funny as this sounds in one way, it's truly horrifying in another. Two or three other residents I've got to 'know' now (without knowing their names or circumstancs of course) are often seen shuffling up and down the corridors, and I wonder how mum interacts with them whenever they might bump into each other.
Mum ate her biscuits and took only a sip or two of the milky tea one of the staff made her, but kept telling me she was full and didn't want anything - something that she had always done anyway in the last couple of years at home. That member of staff had told me that after breakfast, when the other residents went their way to the day rooms or their own rooms or began shuffling up and down the corridor, she had said she didn't want to move and instead stayed there in the dining room. And so it was there that I found her and there where I left her when I had to go.
I wonder now where she might be, either sound asleep in her room, or awake and wondering where she is, or still moving about up and down the corridors, into the day rooms, and maybe even wondering why someone might be screaming somewhere or banging on the doors or walls for help.
There are some memories that will never leave me, and in the last few years some of them have truly scarred me. I don't think anyone that has been affected by dementia in a loved one has ever got used to it, but I guess we all find our own ways to deal with it somehow.
