I continue to read Sally Magnusson book about her mother’s dementia. I read it in short bursts, at breakfast mainly, in between my frequent comings and goings, up and down the stairs making beds, sorting out the washing and other domestic tasks that I long to get done so that the day can stretch out uninterrupted. (It never does, by the way.) It’s a profoundly moving piece of writing. And the way she peppers her mother’s and her own story with scientific facts about what dementia does to the brain is chilling. How will it be to sit across from, to draw people with that condition? Can I ever truly understand what they are feeling? She writes of the fear, the disorientation, the torpor, the loss of self and all that was previously known and, indeed, loved. What are we without self, without direction, without knowing? How is it to care for someone who is lost to us, and themselves. I think of those I remember from the Home. The man who’d sit by the front door day in day out, coat and hat on longing to be taken out. Or the woman who was in the same place my father was at his end, the one I’d catch sight of on her bed, weeping softly and holding a teddy to her chest. It was truly pitiful. Where is grace to be found there? Is it all in the eye of the beholder?
