Life has become a little fraught of late as I try to arrange the third Christmas for my demented mother. It is inconceivable but true that we are coming up to the third Christmas since the death of my father. Because of the dementia of my mother-in-law, followed by the widowerhood of my father-in-law, it had been established fairly early that my in-laws were the ones we spent the holidays with, though they always came to us. When my father-in-law remarried his new family were a son and daughter living in the same house, so they spent Christmas there and my parents had already developed their own traditions of a grown up Christmas with various friends. For the first year after my father died we continued this, as they then had a Christmas lunch with a couple of childless friends. Last year we gave plenty of warning that my mother was not really well enough for this and it was more than enough to do to make the dinner for my mother, who was proud of herself that she managed to eat it all and have some champagne. By nine o’clock on Christmas night we were absolutely thrilled to see the carer and make our excuses and drive home. The arrangements are the same this year, with the same carer. I asked her before I asked the agency, if she would be willing again to cover Christmas night. As her husband drives a taxi and is already fully booked and she will be paid double time she is happy to do the evening and as she is definitely my mother’s favourite carer and highly skilled at her job, I have no worries at all about leaving my mother with her. I do have concerns about my own ability to do the day because my mother now needs much more care than she did and is considerably more chair bound and less mobile than she was.
Festive arrangements for anyone with an illness have to be made around what the patient is able to cope with. There’s not much point in dragging in a full choir if the patient just wants to be quiet. One of the immense benefits of my mother’s carer is her skill in quieting my mother and the fact that she has done a lot of night shifts with my mother and has a well established routine. In the same way that small children are likely to be more difficult at Christmas because their routine is disturbed and they get over excited and do not know what is happening next, so anyone with a compromised brain needs a very familiar fall back position to soothe and calm them.
The family needs consideration too. For the last few weeks my mother has been expressing horror at being alive for Christmas and a strong desire to die before the day. As she has no memory she repeats this strong desire several times an hour, unless she is really worried, in which case it’s several times a minute. Naturally this makes me more stressed. If the OH follows his usual pattern of sitting quietly out of the way I just don’t know how I am going to attend to my mother all the time, cook the dinner, do the phone for her, answer the door and deal with the constant complaints. I’m good but I’m not magic, if she were in a residential home several different people would be doing all of this.
So yesterday, despite having a lot of other things to do, I took the morning off to work out. It sounds such rubbish advice to suggest to people under stress that they exercise. It really does help. Last night I had an early night, the cats were in the house without any contraband, so I shut the cat door, went up early and was in bed by eleven. This morning I feel very much better, so in the next couple of weeks will try my best to get a couple of early nights a week and a couple of workouts too.
The other thing that helps is meditation. This sounds bananas, if you are not used to the idea that sitting quietly trying not to think can be helpful. It can. At the very least it can lower your blood pressure. At the level of practice I am up to, which is not very advanced, it can still help me with my attitude to the difficulties, which at present is key to everything.
Last visit my mother was getting in a stew about her chair. For many years she sat in a reclining chair, reclined, beside a large table covered with all her stuff. It was an ideal position to nurse her in, if we moved the chair beside her, which my father used to sit in. So naturally she decided she couldn’t get comfortable there any more, despite me spending a large amount on memory foam, which I cut up to cover the chair and a ninety-nine position footstool, covered with fake lambswool, which anyone else would have loved but she found too difficult to have in the room.
She decamped to the other side of the room, took over a tub chair and surrounded it with small coffee tables, thus ensuring that A) guests have to be shouted at when they put their tea cups on the carpet B) no one can get at her easily if she is taken ill in the chair C) the television has to be turned so no one else can see it but everyone is deafened by it D) the phone is miles away and has to be fetched by a carer and E) the only chair in the room that I could sit on without exacerbating my Barrett’s oesophagus is now taken, so I cough from the depths of the sofa all visit. Ideal really.
The tub chair was one my father had bought under the impression that it was leather. And so it is, up to a point. It is, in fact, bonded leather. This, I discovered, upon doing some research in a furniture store, is made by macerating leather offcuts to a paste and spraying them on some glued firm fabric, subsequently covering the result with layers of clear finisher. All of which is great until my bored mother sits on the chair and picks the leather off, while volubly expressing her opinion of the manufacturer. I am under strict instructions (as always) upon the instant of her death to ship the offending article to the doorstep of the purveyors of it with a written version of her fulsomely expressed opinion.
So, when she declared herself unable to sit in the leather tub chair anymore, it was but the work of an entire afternoon with much strong language to get her up the north face of the Eiger to try the armchair in the guest bedroom, get it and her back down again, rearrange the room, vacuum the bits of leather off the carpet, take the evil tub chair to the garage, cover the new chair in pillows and cushions and install the complainee.
I counted myself so fortunate to have had the incident with the doctor the previous visit. Then, furious that the doctor had told her to get a grip, she had shimmied upstairs in two minutes flat, a woman on a mission to make me suffer by making her bed four times. So I knew, contrary to all her protestations, that climbing the stairs in the day time would not kill her at all. And for lo! It proved true, she was not found dead in a little flat, stone-heavier-than-two weeks ago heap on the bottom step at all, in fact the next day she was amazed to say she had slept all night for a change.
Anyone else, you might think, would have been annoyed to have spent the visit furniture shifting. I was not. For one thing I work out and so does the OT and we carried the armchair downstairs easily. For another I had just read a book by the Dalai Lama in which he proposed and expanded upon the idea that we should treasure our enemies as they afford us opportunities to develop our compassion, which our friends will never give us. This is absolutely true. Where else am I going to find the opportunity to carry an armchair all wrong past a valuable coffee table while being shouted at, yet still have to retain charm and consideration for the person shouting at me? Where else will I get the chance to bring back the million different positions footstool I was told to throw away and put it in place, perfectly, without saying ‘I told you so’? Where else am I going to get the chance to work all afternoon, to a background of being grumbled at and then be told that the tiny cushion she added at the last minute ‘just made it work’ without making a remark?
He knows a thing or two, that Dalai Lama.
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JaneLaverick.com – furniture removalist to the cantankerous