Anna did not come downstairs today. This is the first time. She was sleepy most of the day, but not distressed. There were lots of carers, Monday is a good day usually. She just didn’t want to come down. Even yesterday, when we had young people around, young to us, she fell asleep almost immediately. We look for explanations – she had a disturbed night at the weekend because of the fireworks, etc. But it was nothing to do with the fireworks, just as her first symptoms of dementia were nothing to do with her mother’s debility. We look for explanations that are not there in the hope that things are temporary.
Mr Churchill, you are drunk.
And you, madam, are ugly. But I shall be sober in the morning.
We all want to wake up refreshed. Anna is not ugly, but she is tired, worn out., and she will be tired and worn out in the morning.
A close friend came on Friday, before the fireworks. Anna’s face brightened, but in a few minutes she subsided into an irritable silence, saying how tired she was.
I was very sad after the visit. We acknowledged that there was not a lot to be said and the friend left.
She had come four months earlier, in the summer. She wrote then: ‘As a friend I can just sit and be beside her and allow my ideas about my friend to float in and out and respond as I hear the fragments of her thoughts and the dream state between us evolves, But I do wonder when she closes her eyes where does she go?’
So do I.
And why, when we have a carer living in now, does she immediately look so much more now like someone in an institution?
I do not think that it is a coincidence that just in these few days she seems to be giving away a big slice of her independence.
I asked the carer if she had any questions. Yes, she said – she could not get the remote to work for the television.
It is good that at times there are two carers. But I have noticed that it changes the balance of power. I see the carers talking together while Anna on her own. They laugh, not cruelly, but she remains frightened and lonely.
Another old friend has a grandchild just learning to walk, staggering, sitting, staggering again.
The regression to dependency is just as remarkable but not so rewarding to watch.