Death watch: not the beetle or the Mandalorians but much more literal, I am sitting with my mother in the hospital, waiting for her to die.
In truth, she has been gone for several years, her brain riddled with the plaques that cause dementia, her body reduced to a hollow shell of its former self and her mind slowly getting more and more lost in that dark space between reality and dementia induced madness.
Dementia is a cruel disease. First for the sufferer as they struggle with daily tasks or conversations. Then for the carers as they look after someone who is regressing into the darkness. And lastly for the family as they lose their loved one over and over again – in many small ways and eventually altogether.
With my Mum, dementia began with language – specifically nouns. She started losing the names of everyday objects.
Or if not the names per se, then maybe the index to find the name in the dictionary of the mind.
When Graham and I first moved in with her to look after her, she was physically frail, and forgetful, but you could still hold a conversation with her. Even then, she would tell the stories of her life over and over again, forgetting she had told you the same story yesterday.
Over the years, conversation grew more and more difficult, to the point when she would struggle to tell you what she needed.
I recall one day she was quite agitated and trying to tell me she had run out of something in her bathroom. Eventually I got her to describe it for me.
“Little squares of paper” was what she finally managed to ask for after struggling for the correct words. This was the best description of toilet paper I had heard in a long time, but she had lost its name. Another word gone in a mind that loved words.
Mum was a primary school teacher all her working life, specialising in English. For her to lose words like that was especially cruel, frustrating for her and those around her alike.
Once we could no longer look after her at home, we found a place for her in a nursing home where she has spent the last few years.
The staff there were very good and kind, but as her mental acuity declined it became difficult to work out what was real and fantasy in what she was saying.
At one point, she was convinced they were putting her to work, looking after variously, other residents, a baby or once a naughty puppy.
I suspect the baby was another resident’s grandchild bought to visit their grandparent; combined with her memories of raising 5 kids and possibly childhood memories of babysitting neighbours’ children.
By this time, she really was away with the fairies.
Even so, it was still a shock when I visited about 2 years ago, and she looked at me with alarm in her eyes, saying “I don’t know who you are”.
I really struggled with visits after then, seeing her decline mentally and physically, combined with my own guilt if I didn’t visit for a while.
In Western Australia to date, we have been lucky to keep the global pandemic away, with our government putting in place strict border policies and snap lockdowns to stay on top of COVID.
So we haven’t seen the waves of COVID running through nursing homes and the deaths of aged love ones that there have been elsewhere in Australia or around the world.
So it seems almost strange and a little hypocritical to sit death watch here in hospital with mum where so many people have been denied that due to COVID.
I am told by the Doctors and Nurses that she only has hours left, days at the outside.
But for now she is comfortable, and her passing while sad, will be a relief for all concerned.
At least I got to sit with her for a while at the end.