As I still have this streaming cold I don’t feel well enough to do much. Television is stupid. (You noticed?) Books are heavy to hold and I only have five minutes before I cough again. I need something which you can do with no effort for five minutes at a time, which does not involve someone selling me something I don’t want, or gloomy stuff about the world, or the weather.
And, for lo! Here it is. This is it.
So I randomly picked a topic from the list to the right and read the third one. Did you know if you scroll down to the bottom and follow the arrow to the right it takes you to the next post? If you go left it takes you to the previous post.
Anyway I got into the middle of 2013, a year after my father died, when I was new to being a carer. I cannot imagine how I lived through all of that. My relatives were so horrible. I had forgotten how so many people who had no intention of helping financially or practically expected in my scant time off to have two hour phone calls keeping them up to date. I had forgotten that my cousin turned up on the doorstep explaining that he was next of kin now and wanted a copy of my father’s will to see how much he was getting, completely ignoring my mother who was still alive.
I had forgotten about my broken arm going mouldy and having to have the plaster off and the hooks removed. To this day I have a dimple in my wrist and one in my hand. I had forgotten that regardless of the medics here telling me to do nothing on peril of my bones not mending, the care agency there demanded my presence, so they could save their skins and my mother patting me endlessly on the broken arm until it swelled up so I couldn’t get a sleeve over the wrist.
This month in five days it will be eight years since my mother died and I think she is beginning to wear off a bit. I counted on my fingers and found it was 2023 at this time of year that I should have been celebrating surviving cancer for five years but I was still so ill from the adhesion surgery I missed it.
2012 to 2017 is five years but eight years to be absolutely recovered. Nobody ever tells you this. No fortune teller ever said ‘You are going to spend eight years of your life caring, or recovering from caring, for someone who abused you, at the cost of your health, wealth and happiness.’ That’s a ninth of my life.
At the start of a new year the ancient god in charge is Janus, who looks both ways. It’s worth squinting down the lane of the past to watch yourself running through a hailstorm of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune to get to here and notice how you are building resilience every step of the way.
I’ve posted this in Dementia Diaries just in case you are a new carer. You do eventually come out of it at the other end with the wisdom of experience, the strength that only negotiating extreme difficulty for many years can grow and the knowledge that you can do a lot more than you thought you could do.
If caring for someone demented looks to be the year ahead of you, good luck, every little thing I found is here to be read. For myself I am looking to the future and hoping for dolls, writing, and cheerfulness and expecting all of them to come from within.
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