The Hazards of Toast and Roasties

Mum says, with confidence, over lunch:

'They have found a new disease'.

Mum is a newshound. She watches, listens, avidly.  Podcasts, the television, printed headlines which she labours through. The news has always informed her breakfast time conversation.  

That hasn't changed. Except that now, now she is less reliable in her delivery of the news.

'What's that?' I ask.

I am also a news aficionado; I'm pretty sure I know what she is going to tell me.

'Well they have found it in a small animal', she says, 'this new disease; they get it from toast that is too brown and roast potatoes'.

This conversation is already veering towards the insane.

I am not sure which small animals regularly eat charred toast or roast potatoes.

She means cancer: scientists believe that - along with red wine and red meat and all the other good stuff in life, toast and chips and roasties give you cancer now too.

'Not cancer?', I question, hoping I might rein this back towards something that makes sense.

'No love, not cancer'. She delivers this with patronising authority. Partly because she is certain of her knowledge. Mostly because she is not.

I am beginning to learn not to argue.

But I am a slow learner.

The other day, on a long drive home, through country my mother has driven through only once in her entire life, she told me confidently, 'Oh look!' and she points enthusiastically out of the window at a building, 'that's where we had lunch with A'.

A is my daughter. We had lunch with her, certainly, but not there, not in that forgettable building; we had lunch in another building, in quite another country.

I respond too hastily (because I am too slow to learn).

'No we didn't, Mum, not there, not that building'. And I regret the words as soon as they're spoken.

But she is insistent. Distress is quickly evident in her rising tone. 'Yes we did'.

I try to soften my correction by telling her that we had lunch with A, certainly, and that perhaps the building where we ate lunch looked a little like the one she has spotted.

'I'd know that building anywhere', she says, 'and whatever you say, we had lunch there with A last week'.

She is angry. Partly because she is certain of her knowledge. Mostly because she is not.

I sink back into my seat and feel sick because my mother's memory is in tatters, it unravels in knotted threads of psychedelic colours so that there is no cohesion and because her intellect is so blunted that her arguments are small and infantile now, reduced to what she does remember and muddled by what she does not.

My only comfort is that this conversation, this upsetting, brief, confrontation, will be forgotten by her very soon. As so much is.

Who's Who?

Mum says, 'Who's Hugh?'

Who's who.

She asks all the time. Who's who?

I tell her, 'Hugh is my brother in law'.

Oh, she says.

She considers this for a moment.

'Is he married?'

Yes, I tell her. I told her yesterday. And the day before.

'Does he have children?'.

Yes I tell her. I told her yesterday. And the day before.

'He has four', I say.

I try hard to be patient. I don't say, 'Mum, I told you yesterday - he has four ...'.  I try to sound as if this is not a conversation we have had a dozen times in three days.

An hour later.

'Who's Hugh?'.

He's my brother in law.

'I don't think I've heard you talk about him before, have I?', Mum asks,  looking just a trifle doubtful.

No, I say, I don't think so.

This is the hardest part of living with a parent with a failing, fading memory: there is no continuum to our conversations.

She does not remember who the key protagonists are in any of my stories.

Feathers

Mum says, over breakfast, when I ask what has caught her attention - she is staring, fixedly - into the middle distance.

'That plant', she says, gesturing the lemongrass in a pot, 'what can I see beneath its feathers?'.

Leaves, Mum, I say, 'beneath its leaves'.

Beneath its leaves, Mum confirms, apparently unfazed.

Nobody else at the breakfast table seems to notice, least of all my husband who nonchalantly continues to plough through bacon and toast.

Only I feel the belly kick.

Feathers for leaves.

Do I take every slip, every wrong word, every lost name, as a sinister step into the dark. Away from me. From us.

When we were small, on a farm in Africa, the generator was turned off at ten every night and a hurricane lantern was lit to illuminate our way to the outside loo. When it was turned off and I watched the glow fade, I was struck by the fragility of the mantle from which that hot bright light had emanated all night.

If I touched the mantle it would disintegrate as dust between my fingers.

Sometimes I worry mum's mind is as a mantle. The hot bright light of her dazzling intellect has faded and what is left is gossamer thin and brittle .