Candi Miller - Conversations

LAST POST

1/29/2021

“Forgive me for needing you to be strong forever.
Forgive me for fearing your unhappiness.
As you suffer[ed], so I suffer.
As you endur[ed], so I endure.
Hold my hand and walk the old walk one last time,
then let me go.”

Untitled poem, as spoken in the film, Hope Gap,
written and directed by William Nicholson (2020).

I now allow the comfort provided by what my friend, J, said, on Myra's death:
"A mother’s love lasts long after the final hug."

And finally, a famous poem by Rabindranath Tagore that resonates for me more than ever, almost two years after my mother’s death.

Say not in grief that she is no more
but say in thankfulness that she was.
A death is not the extinguishing of a light,
but the putting out of the lamp
because the dawn has come.

I began by thinking I could save you, but in the end,
all I can do is honour you.

The first anniversary

4/11/2020

My mother achieved her wish for death on April 11, 2019.

On the first anniversary of her death I scattered her ashes in the garden she’d made. The camellia she nursed back to life was white with waxen blooms and her sulking clematis finally flowered. She'd also insisted on transplanting what I thought of as old lady, lily-of-the-valley.

—  It's invasive.
— It will remind you of me then. (She'd moved in with us at at the time.)

Unseasonally early, the lily-of-the-valley in that patch of garden sprouted by April 11, 2020. Myra's great-grand daughter toddled about, poking at the rows of tiny, white bells on the plant. The day was fresh and sunny, full of peace and promise.

— By the way, that camellia you rescued has more flowers on it this year than ever before. Whatever did you feed it?
— TLC, love

A year on, I'm reconciled to the choices Myra made. And I've forgiven myself for not being as forebearing as I might have.

I find myself standing at the Myra-bed having conversations with her:

—  You were right about that clematis – it wasn’t dead. And would you believe, the lily-of-the -valley are already full of flowers? Fragrant little bells.
—   Myra Bells. (Bell was her maiden name.)
—   I’m sorry I argued about making this flower bed, Mum. It’s lovely now. A special place to stand and chat to you.
—   Hmpf. (She wasn’t above an ‘I-told-you-so’.)
—   By the way, that camellia you rescued has more flowers on it this year than ever before. Whatever did you feed it?
—   TLC, love.

Trying to die

2/20/2020

My mother tried very hard to die. She stopped eating – everything. To avoid nagging from me and other carers she became sly at pretending to eat, or at devising reasonable excuses why she couldn't... just yet. With such cunning that I often doubted her dementia.

Eventually, we all stopped pretending and watched in horror as her body consumed all its remaining fat deposits – cheeks, chin, buttocks. Her stomach hung like a hammock from her hip bones.

Sometimes Myra became so ill I’d think she was about to succeed in her deathwish. Seeing her agony and reading terror in her sunken eyes, I’d make calls to the doctor, take her to hospital for scans and tests, insist she took the prescribed pills. She railed at being ‘prodded and poked, carted about, bothered with’. In hospital waiting rooms this dignified woman became shockingly rude. I felt frustrated to the point of sullen fury and worse, like a traitor for trying to sabotage her plan.

Trying to die isn’t like trying to commit suicide – it may actually be harder, because what you are trying to do is what you least want to have happen; you dread it but there it is and it must be done, and by no one but you.

Philip Roth
( Granta 24, May 2019)

R.I.P
SHIRLEY MYRA MILLER (née BELL)
1934 – 2019

One afternoon I cuddled up to what was left of her and cried like a child. She tried to cradle me like a mother.
- Don't cry, darling. It will be alright.
- What if your pain is from cancer?
- Well then I’ll die from cancer.
- But you might need serious pain medication.
- No more pills.

Sometimes, for a few days or weeks she’d forget not to eat and drink, put on a few grams and get back to making political predictions:

That Boris Johnson, he’ll be next Prime Minister, mark my words.

To transgenderise Roth writing about his father:

It would seem that to prevail here, to try dying and to do it, she would have to work even harder than she did in the [selling] business, where she achieved a remarkable success for a woman with her educational handicaps. Of course, here too she … eventually succeed[ed] – through … the assiduous application she gave to every job ever assigned to her.
(ibid)

Water infection

2/27/2019

Myra was in so much pain I called an emergency doctor. The shiny-haired young thing was at a loss about what to do for someone who could not be diagnosed because she refused an endoscopy and who eschewed all anti-spasmodic medication. So Dr Longlocks tests a urine sample.

— You have an infection in your water.

— I knew there was something wrong with the water in this place. It should be shut down. I‘m not drinking a drop from that tap unless it’s boiled and filtered.

Nor did she.

Does the dementia mind become more literal or is this a case of uncontaminated logic over colloquialism?

Or is dementia paranoia?

Guest Blogger - Mandy Ross

2/19/2019

Mandy Ross is a poet and children's author. She writes in community arts projects. Her dad, Alan, 84, is a retired pharmacist. He recently moved into a nice Jewish care home. He's only ever been Jew-ish; the Jewishness of the place would appall him were he in any fit state... there must be a Jewish joke in there somewhere.

Nisht Vor Mir

Today my father summons his grandmother,
an old lady. Nisht vor mir, she would say.
Not for me, someone else must bend to pick up from the floor.
Nisht vor mir, I am old now, I am too old.
He is a small, obedient grandson, picking up the things she drops.

Now my father is his grandmother's age.
He is amazed. Old? Me? Nisht vor mir.
His eyes hide blankness.
He swims lost in a wood, his map a sieve of branches.
His old watch ticks in the present tense.

He swims lost in a wood, his map a sieve of branches.

Now he is the young man in the photo in Mum’s wallet
nearly sixty years since they made their vows.
(Youth’s easy promise. Old age? Nisht vor uns.)
Now she counts out her pledge to him with his bedtime pills,
helps him dress, keeps his youth between the notes.

Nisht vor mir: Not for me (Yiddish)

Pun-gent

Knock, knock,
Who’s there?
Dad.
Dad who?
Still Dad, still likes a joke.

Waiter, waiter, there’s a fly in the care home.
Don’t shout, sir, everyone will want one.
What do you get if you cross Dad with dementia?
Pun-gent.
Hates a shower, still loves wordplay.

Doctor, doctor,
What’s actually happening in Dad’s brain?
Are there holes like Swiss cheese?
Not in the humour cortex.

What has four legs and can see just as well from either end?
This armchair. It’s very comfy,
but you’ll get sore if you sit for too long.

I say, I say, I say,
what’s the point of telling jokes in the residents’ lounge?
Still human, still waiting for the punchline.

What goes ha-ha-ha-bonk?
Patients, staff and visitors laughing their heads off.

What’s actually happening in Dad’s brain?
Are there holes like Swiss cheese?
Not in the humour cortex.

WET WASHING

2/17/2019

This evening I get a call from CareLine. Mother has been pressing the emergency button (on a chord around her neck) repeatedly. CareLine phoned her number, but no response, so summoned an ambulance; they’re just letting me know as Next of Kin.

An ambulance – she won’t like that, even if she’s dying. Especially if she’s dying. I rush over.
Outside her housing complex I see the First Responders unit– they’re leaving.

—Excuse me, have you just attended Myra Miller?

—Yes. Don’t worry, duck, she’s alright.

—What happened?

—She couldn’t get her laundry out the machine.

I start to laugh. I know I shouldn’t, but it’s the sight of these two burly blokes bristling with life-saving equipment and the thought that they rushed down the corridor … to rescue wet washing.

Good-naturedly they explain that Mother thought she was summoning a carer (Lately she forgets how to operate appliances, and being deaf, she didn’t hear the phone ringing in her flat.) I apologise profusely for the inconvenience.

—No worries, duck, we were only up the town.

—I’m sure my mother is very embarrassed.

She's forgetting how to operate appliances.
Even very familiar ones.

—Aye, bless ‘er. Offered to make us a cuppa and a Christmas cake each next year.

Crossing the bridge

2/13/2019

The difficulty of coping with an elderly, confused parent - a conversation I've found myself having quite often in recent years.

With Frederica, something about a lack former intimacy between us facilitated my confession about feeling resentment towards my mother; I suspected that Myra then, about two years ago, was far more capable than she allowed herself to be. (Scans and assessments indicated some fall off in cognitive function, but not as much as she complained of). And she certainly didn’t need the two sticks she insisted on. When angry she strode off without support... like when I so annoyingly pointed out that hers was a gilded life by comparison with those of the people I’ve worked with in the Kalahari desert.

Frederica raised an elegant eyebrow — And how did that go for you?

I laughed and show her my ‘knife’ wounds.

Frederica refers me to a TEDX talk, ‘The Power of Connection’, by clinical psychologist, Hedy Schleifer, who like me, had a hero mother * she felt she was losing to dementia.

It resonated with me so I'll list some learnings:

I needed to present myself to Myra simply as her daughter, not as the know-it-all, resentful, too busy woman she was slightly afraid of and felt ashamed of being so dependent upon. I needed to try and see the situation from her point of view.

I had ‘polluted the sacred space’ my mother and I inhabited together – ‘via a look, a judgement, a criticism’, (Schleifer, TEDX, 2011. ) We were so uncomfortable we reacted to ‘the danger in the space’ by ‘exploding our energy’ or ‘withdrawing’.

(See why it resonated?)

Schleifer recommended ‘crossing the bridge’ into one’s mother’s world. Leave behind prejudices, ego, identity, justifications and story.

So, before ringing Myra’s doorbell, I mentally discarded my suspicions, grudges, resentments and agenda, and stepped in just as her daughter. No baggage.

You know what? It worked.

*My father was, at best, a narcissist, but Myra managed to keep my sister and me from his worst abuses. She made the house look nice and our five-acre plot productive: vegetables, fruit and a horse-baiting business. Sometimes she worked three jobs and she ran a thriving equestrian club because her kids were horse-crazy. She supported our tertiary education while getting professional qualifications of her own and for a decade she travelled the world selling cookware very successfully.

Time

2/13/2019

— I can’t tell if it’s day or night.

— I know; it’s that time of year. Short, dark days.

— When I woke up just now I thought it was morning, but it’s not, is it? (She looks genuinely puzzled)

— No, it’s late afternoon, nearly early evening.

Later she returns to the worry.

— I don’t know if it’s morning or afternoon.

— Look at your clock. See, it says 16;43.

— But is that 16:43 in the morning or the afternoon?

— Um, perhaps we should reset the clock to show a.m. and p.m?

— I won’t see that.

Later, still fretting about date and time while staring at the large clock with its enormous numbers on the display.

— It’s going to be Boxing Day soon.

— Yes.

— My mother died on Boxing day. Maybe I’ll be lucky.

Little Knives

2/13/2019

Anyone remember the way the eponymous hero in Vernon God Little likened a mother’s ability to emotionally wound her child as receiving a small stab in the back? (Whatever happened to DBC Pierre after that great literary début?)

My mother’s dementia seems to have increased her accuracy at knife-throwing. Or perhaps I’ve just slowed down as a moving target? My guilt complex, nurtured, I now realise, by Myra’s parenting style, has grown unfeasibly large and encompasses everything from apartheid to climate change. I’m a sitting duck for emotional blackmail.
— You’re always too busy.
— You’re always in such a rush.

Then there’s After-all-I’ve-done-for-you and If-you-loved-me. Shameless stuff, and in her right mind, Myra wouldn’t have been so transparent. I wonder if dementia corrodes parts of the personality while exaggerating others? Is it always the worst parts that bloom like blisters?

I wonder if dementia corrodes parts of the personality while exaggerating others?
Is it always the worst parts that bloom like blisters?

Reasoning with her doesn’t help. I switch to remonstrating.

— Don't you dare scold your mother!

She balls her fists and waves one at me, saying she’d like to smash it into my face. I'm shocked. I know how irritating criticism from one's child is, but her reaction is uncharacteristic and disproportionate. I withdraw, popping in only briefly for errand-duty in the days that follow.

She doesn’t say sorry and nor do I. While I stand at the door she bumbles around her immaculately organised flatlet trying to find the chore lists she’s drawn up for me.
They are lost amid her coping notes:

Go to lunch. 11:45. Everyday.
I tablet, morning and night.
Turn shower towards wall for hot.
Emergency numbers....

I don’t help.

— Every time you walk through that door I start feeling confused.

(A knife, but just a glancing blow).

— I’m sorry, we say simultaneously.

The good girl and the bad boy

2/11/2019

My parents met in Leeds in the early 1950s. He was the George Best of his day, handsome and headstrong, unusually, a South African import in the Leeds United football squad. I wondered how a naturally shy person like Myra caught the eye of the local legend?

— On the bus.

— Football stars travelled by public transport in those days!

— Oh yes. They didn’t earn much more than anyone else.

— But you weren’t a football fan. How did you recognise him?

— He was always in the newspaper. Everyone knew the footballers.

— I bet he flirted with you on the bus.
(I’ve seen pictures of her then, the height of affordable glamour.)

— Yes. Gave me tickets to a match. My dad was a big fan, so we went… But it was very embarrassing.

— Why?

— Because George stopped in front of the stand and waved at me when he ran onto the pitch. Everyone turned and looked at me ... my dad frowned but I knew he was chuffed.

Now I understand her uncharacteristically bold decision to follow George to South Africa, in the days when it was unheard of for nice lasses to undertake solo adventures abroad. They were eventually married. Very unhappily. As an only, motherless child (Myra lost her mum aged 7) she adored George's big-hearted mother and his warm sisters, as they loved their ‘Limey’, even after the divorce.