JAMES is looking at me anxiously and I can see him screw his courage up as he prepares to ask me something.
“This is a bit embarrassing,” he says eventually, “but who exactly are you?”
“I’m Georgina,” I say, and he peers at me more closely.
“Well that’s awkward,” he replies. “My first wife was also called Georgina...”
It’s been a difficult month and I have only just brought myself to updating my blog because that makes it real.
A flare up of James’ colitis before Christmas caused daily poo-namis which are only now starting to subside, and two falls left him looking as though he had been at the wrong end of a mugging.
It has become apparent too in recent weeks that he is sundowning more and speaking less - and the conversational balls he does throw up in the air are both meaningless and impossible to deflect.
“So,” he says, gesturing around the home we have owned for 40 years, “how much did we get when we sold the house?”
“What exactly is the situation..?”
“Have you booked the cab for the airport?”
“Do we have a kitchen..?”
There is no right answer to any of these questions – our home is not on the market, we are not leaving the house, the kitchen remains where it has been for the past four decades and there is no ‘situation’ - except the dementia which cannot speak its name.
If I go along with James’ daily fantasies (living in his reality is the professional name for it) I merely mire myself deeper as he demands suitcases, tickets and passports before an immediate departure to ensure we are home from Australia before bedtime.
And if I demur, pointing out the familiar trappings of home – the photos of our grandchildren, a favourite armchair – James sighs heavily and says, more in sorrow than in anger, “Oh don’t start that old nonsense again...”
While some anodyne halfway house - “It’s late, so let’s stay here tonight and get to the airport tomorrow” - throws up anxieties about where we will sleep, whether we are “booked in” to our bedrooms and how we will manage without clean clothes in the morning.
It is exhausting, and I frequently feel there is no room in my head for thoughts of my own, as the relentless tide of James’ confusion breaks in unstoppable waves on my brain.
And he has adopted what I can only call a verbal tic to endorse his more outré announcements.
The French say n’est-ce pas after making a statement to which they are expecting an answer in the affirmative. So stroll down a sunny boulevarde and someone is likely to observe, “It is a beautiful day n’est-ce pas..?”
James merely tacks on an interrogatory “Yes?”
“Our flight is this evening, yes?”
“Both our granddaughters are pregnant, yes?”
And his usual early morning grumpiness is hardening into something more combative.
“You are a waste of space,” he tells me as I help him into the bath, warning grimly that if the water is too hot, he intends to report me to the police.
Saddest of all, as I lower him into the perfectly-judged water, he adds as a cross aside, “and if I ever said I love you, I take it back...”
“Yes?”
It amazes me how sanely you write .Praying that this difficult time eases soon for you. A very touching post indeed
Total understanding as I go through similar with Mum. She is so agitated and anxious, not knowing where she is even though she's lived there 66 years. Take care xx 😘