Time for review. I look at Anna with a sudden shock. I stop and really look.
Social services and others do their reviews. The social worker was coming to see us yesterday but she phoned to say her car had been blocked in and she couldn’t make it …. What bad luck people have.
I can do my own review. Looking again – that’s all it means. So I take note of how Anna is frail, lost, how she looks like her mother, who died aged 94.
(All men become like their fathers. That is their … what? I forget the quotation, but I know how it goes on All women become like their mothers, that is their tragedy. Who said that?)
Speaking for myself – and not wanting to be disrespectful to the dead, I would not like to be any more like my father than I am. But I look at Anna and see her mother’s gleam, the eyes sharp out of a shrunken face. They were both tough ladies, and in their prime they fought like – cats? dogs? – like women of independent mind.
I remember her mother well, and Anna is pleased when I talk about her. A Labour Councillor of the old sort, she defended the rights of minorities until she became one herself. With Anna I have the same sense of the power stripped off her and all that is left is the residual authority in her eyes.
Anna is going to get NHS care at last. She went with her mother to the Labour Party celebrations in 1987 at Alexandra Palace of 40 years of the NHS. I remember Neil Kinnock singing. But her mother, a Labour stalwart for those forty years, with a signed photograph of Harold Wilson in her room, never got that NHS care in her nursing home: it was paid for by the sale of her house. Wilson retired early, though not as early as Anna. We learned later that he had Alzheimers.
Anna is still young to have dementia. I have heard that this may be to her advantage, that NHS per capita budgetting limits are much higher if you are under 65. I’m sure they have a rationale for this, to do with their arcane calculations – like the QALY calculations about the cost effectiveness of drugs – about the value of a person’s life. You should know that in the eyes of the state you depreciate rapidly when you are past working age.
You are only as old as you feel, they say. But Anna feels old. I think that’s enough review for now.