Sorrow

I miss and grieve for my mother.  I still do, five years after her death; in some senses, ten years after.  Fifteen years ago she started to exhibit the early signs of senile dementia.  I started to miss her then; about two years after that she stopped solving the Telegraph crossword on her own; three years after that she stopped trying to solve it.  At that point I knew what hadn't been said, that her brain was silently destroying itself, that she was effectively passing into shadow and distress.  Inevitably, she was going.  The pain of this is like a knife in my heart, even now.  Nine years ago, when my then wife was not in the room, she simply looked at me and said "I know I'm repeating myself, but if I'm not me any more; if it gets worse, please make sure I don't just carry on."

I am still unbearably upset by that, the true measure of helplessness is when someone you love asks you to do something you know you can't do.  Even so, I felt I should do it for her - I wrestled with this, in the dark of the night.  When, three years before she died, I came to visit and she had wandered out of the house leaving the front door open; I knew it was time.  But although I found her and brought her back I had someone much younger with me, so there was no opportunity.  There is something about age and appreciation of mortality which only age can bring.  Her time had come.  I knew it, and what was much worse, so did she in her lucid moments.  But then we had to get her into a care home.  I am still in a part of me, ashamed that I could not kill her, bring her long long suffering to an end.  You can judge me or not, as you please.  But I still miss that very bright, highly intelligent cantankerous old bitch.  She was my Mum.