‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while she moaned to me about it on the phone.
‘How fast do you want it to go?’ I asked, imagining it doing 60mph down the short run of stairs in their little house in Coventry, coming to an abrupt halt at the bottom, then catapulting her across the living-room floor because she never does the seatbelt up.
‘It’s too slow!’ she declared, and I could hear her slapping various bits of it and banging the switches on the arm. ‘When the man comes to service it I’m going to tell him to make it go faster. Come on! Come on! Blasted thing…’
I imagined it again at warp speed, this time going up the stairs like a rocket, smoking at the back and launching my mother into the upstairs landing so fast she shoots through the loft hatch.
In the next scene, I see my mother being removed from the loft by firemen, moaning about her hair being messed up, because there is only one thing she spends more time on than the stairlift, and that is doing and re-doing her hair, to go on the stairlift, mostly.
I would not laugh or make jokes about dementia for any other reason than to survive the relentless pressure of it. As my mother and father become ever more capricious, I realise I am in danger of deteriorating mentally, going down a wormhole that no one talks about which feels like dementia is a contagion.
If I do not use humour to differentiate myself from the madness that is engulfing them, then I have to shut my mind off completely to deal with it and that leads to a sort of blank-headed feeling, which persists long after I try to switch my brain back on. ‘What did I do yesterday?’ I ask myself, thinking, ‘I have no idea. I have no memory!’
My mother whirs up and down in her stairlift all day complaining about wanting it to go faster, because she needs to do her hair, while my father sits in front of the BBC rolling news, a habit he has been addicted to for years, but which became particularly debilitating after lockdown.
The BBC could broadcast anything and my father would take it as gospel. If it told him to go outside and stand on his head, he would make an attempt at it. As his BBC addiction peaked recently, he was responding to me asking whether the carers had been by shouting: ‘You’re a bigot like Trump you are!’ To which I had to reply: ‘Righto, yes. But have you had some dinner?’ ‘You’re a bully! You’re like Trump!’ ‘Yes, Dad, I know. But did the lady come to do your dinner?’ And so on.
My father bought big-time into what I like to call the mainstream narrative, and he has been furious at me for questioning this narrative, and by extension our glorious authorities, who work tirelessly for our benefit and for the common good.
Strangely he is very anti-Russian, which is part of the narrative he has to swallow, but as I point out to him, all this guff about me being a conspiracy theorist, it seems very Soviet to me.
He had made me and my views firmly public enemy number one, along with Putin, and Trump. So I was heartily amused when my father turned around the other day and announced, with a too-casual tone in his voice: ‘I’m not having any more Covid vaccine. Or the flu jab.’
‘Dear me,’ I said to the builder boyfriend when I came off the phone, but he was already laughing because my father had been on speakerphone. ‘The government has got its work cut out if even my father is refusing vaccines now.’
My father was so keen on the Covid jab that he had nine of them and declared himself thoroughly satisfied with what followed, which included getting Covid so badly he couldn’t shift long Covid.
Before he went downhill, had a heart attack and then a stroke, he was able to rationalise perfectly.
The fact that he is now performing a screeching about-turn to declare he doesn’t support Covid vaccines is perhaps indicative of dementia.
He says the NHS sends him reminders and he ignores them. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said: ‘Oh.’
‘Yes, I stopped having them when your mother stopped,’ he said, rewriting a significant period of recent history, because my mother stopped having them three years ago after an attack of vertigo, but he carried on for two more years and was having them up until last spring, according to his own records.
I found the Covid booster appointment in his diary, written in his handwriting, when I was visiting them. After telling me he was going out to do something, he duly disappeared at the appointed time and when he came back I asked him, out of interest, and he said: ‘No, I only had a flu shot.’
So at that point, he had moved from having them and boasting about it to having them but denying it. Now he’s not having them, allegedly, and boasting about it.
I don’t understand my father. And I resent the fact that since lockdown he has been made to recede from me even more than usual.
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