The days are long in Dad’s house in the last year of his life. He is mostly asleep in a hospital bed in the corner of the room, while I sit quietly on the sofa hoping he sleeps a little longer. I sit watching him, worrying he’s stopped breathing, listening to the radio playing pop songs that transform the room into a time machine. “Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead…”, T Rex’s Ride a White Swan transports me back to 1970, watching Top of the Pops in this room, Dad teasing us about Marc Bolan’s shoes or Noddy Holder’s trousers.
When he wakes up, I ask him if he remembers the song. He shakes his head slowly. “I don’t remember anything…” Even trying to remember is too difficult and so, as the song fades away, we fall back into silence until he asks if we can look at spoons.
At the age of 92, bedbound, lost in dementia land and not really “Dad” any more, he likes to look through cutlery. He points to my mother’s cabinet of curiosities and asks if we can look through the drawers and then he sits up in bed looking through corkscrews, forks and spoons. There are silver teaspoons, sewing hooks, cigarette holders and caddy spoons. He likes to pick up each piece of cutlery and hold it up to the light like a man who has never seen a spoon in his life. “That’s a beautiful spoon. It’s probably worth at least £10!” We appreciate the beauty of the spoon.
For a few moments he is no longer living in the elsewhere of dementia. Once again, he is the junk dealer he used to be and we are in his shop selling the old brown furniture and crockery bought for a song in auction rooms. Seeing him enchanted by these copper and silver treasures is like watching a child, lost in wonder. For now, he is a junk man again, just for a fleeting moment, enough to make me cry.
Suddenly, the junk shop fades away and we’re in the waiting room at a train station, but we’re not sure where we’re going. My dad is anxious and doesn’t want to be here. He can’t face going on a journey. The station is busy and there’s too much going on here for him to settle. He’s worried about who’s going to pay for the tickets and wants to know how far we are from home.
Then, towards midday, we’re in an imaginary garden full of children playing. He’s enjoying their laughter and he laughs, too, as they chase each other across the lawn having a high old time. He’s sitting in a deckchair, quietly enjoying the visitors, raising his hand to wave as they skip away into the shadows.
He closes his eyes, as if he is closing down the vision of the garden and it occurs to me that these children are his children. They are me and my two sisters. The room is almost silent, apart from the old songs and the slow breathing of the old man in the bed. I have the sense that the world we knew is disappearing. The children will stop playing in the garden before long.
In the afternoons, we watch television shows about car boot sales and antiques. He shakes his head, appalled by what he’s seeing, and turns to watch the garden birds instead. “Why would anyone want to waste their lives with all that rubbish?” I have stopped reminding him he used to sell junk for a living, because it makes him agitated. He can go into that world of old furniture in the waking dream of dementia, but in this world, where it really happened, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
We switch channels and watch A Place in the Sun, and he says he’s never been to Spain. There are photographs of him on Spanish holidays with my mother. He doesn’t seem to remember my mother.
Sometimes I go upstairs and rummage through wardrobes and cupboards where I find things like thimbles and old coins and pop them in my pocket. It feels important to collect small treasures, things he’s touched and kept. In a suitcase in my childhood bedroom, I find bubblegum cards, seashells and Christmas cracker trinkets, each object possessed with memory.
He calls for help and I go downstairs to find him hunched at the bottom of the bed. He doesn’t know where his legs are and wants me to find them. I rummage through the blankets and tell him I’ve found them. “They were here all along!” He’s relieved. When he asks me if I’ve found anything interesting upstairs, I empty my pockets and show him the small treasures. He touches each enchanted object and then looks at my arthritic hands, wondering what’s wrong with them, but unable to find the words to ask. We hold each other’s hands.
We are each other’s companion, but we both feel lost and lonely now that my sister Kathryn has gone back to work. The days go on for ever and I feel like there is so much I don’t know about dementia, this strange and cruel disease. He doesn’t understand his own condition and neither do I, no matter how much I read about it.
My own health deteriorates and the list keeps on growing: two types of arthritis, coronary-artery disease, osteoporosis, skin cancer. In a house of broken gutters and drainpipes, rain in the hall, cracks in the gable and a collapsing garage, we live in a time of endings, and I come to believe this broken house is us.
After the death of my mother, I didn’t go home for 17 years. Dad didn’t want anyone to visit. His heart was broken and he didn’t know how to mend it or explain how much it hurt. I would meet him at the auction room and then we’d go for a pint in the Rose & Crown, and we’d mostly sit in silence, the way we always had. Silence suited us. We got on well, but didn’t feel the need to speak. Or perhaps it was easier not to. Then we’d load up the van with furniture and go our separate ways.
When I finally went home, while he was in hospital after a fall, I returned to the house of a hoarder. Every room was full of furniture from floor to ceiling. In the centre of this labyrinth of wardrobes and cupboards there was an armchair and a kettle. Lost without my mother he had filled the void with Victorian furniture and crockery. Effectively he had filled the empty space with grief. And then, with increasing frailty and the isolation of Covid, he became his own ghost, a lost soul in a labyrinth of wardrobes.
I am torn between not wanting to be here and feeling this is the most important place to be. We watch the birds – the real birds – in the garden, the wood pigeons and blackbirds, the goldfinches and sparrows, the occasional thrilling visit from the woodpecker. This is his only pleasure. Well, this and the drawer full of spoons.
Soon my sister will be home from work and we will eat our Marks & Spencer microwave dinner while Dad disappears into dementia land again, falling asleep as the long day finally draws to a close. We sleep in the quiet house, hoping he sleeps through the night. When he does wake up calling for help, he doesn’t seem to know who we are. His long life wasn’t supposed to end like this. In this emptiness. He says he wants to die. In his sleep. He’s had enough – and why is he still here? As much as we love him, we understand his wish. He pleads with me, as if I’m in charge of death. Guiltily, I hope he gets his wish.
I find a photograph of my parents on a bike in Amsterdam – Dad peddling, Mum on the back rest “Dutch-style”. I show Dad and he asks me who the people are. I tell him the man is him and the woman is my mum. He looks at me, confused and says quietly: “She looks like a really nice lady, I think she might have been my wife…”
I’ve gone home to get some sleep when my sister phones at 4am to tell me Dad’s wish came true. I think how much I want to sit with him again, watch his fascination as he looks through the drawer of cutlery, holding each piece up to the light like a child on Christmas Day, shaking his head slightly and saying: “That’s a beautiful spoon. It’s probably worth at least £10!” And I think, if only we could go there again, back to those long days in that living room, and sit quietly looking through the spoons.
Wild Twin by Jeff Young is published by Little Toller Books at £20. Buy a copy for £18 at guardianbookshop.com
