This days are long in Father’s house in the last year of his life. He mostly sleeps in a hospital bed in the corner of the room, while I sit quietly on the couch and hope he sleeps a little longer. I sit and watch him, worried that he’s stopped breathing, listening to the radio playing pop songs that turn 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, check it out Top of the Pops in this room, dad teasing us about Marc Bolan’s shoes or Noddy Holder’s pants.
When he woke up, I asked him if he remembered the song. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t remember anything…” Even trying to remember is too difficult and so, as the song fades, we fall back into silence until he asks if we can look at spoons.
At the age of 92, bedridden, lost in dementia land and not really “Dad” anymore, he likes to look through cutlery. He points to my mother’s curiosity cabinet and asks if we can look through the drawers and then he sits up in bed and looks through corkscrews, forks and spoons. There are silver teaspoons, sewing hooks, cigarette holders and caddy spoons. He likes to pick up every piece of cutlery and hold it up to the light like a man who has never seen a spoon in his life. “It’s a beautiful spoon. It’s probably worth at least £10!” We appreciate the beauty of the spoon.
For a few moments he no longer lives in the other place 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. To see him mesmerized by these copper and silver treasures is like looking at a child, lost in wonder. For now he is a trash man again, just for a fleeting moment, enough to make me cry.
Suddenly the junk shop disappears and we’re in the waiting room at a train station, but we’re not sure where we’re going. My father is anxious and does not want to be here. He cannot afford to travel. The station is busy and too much is happening here for him to settle. He is worried about who will pay for the tickets and wants to know how far we are from home.
Then, at noon, we are in an imaginary garden full of children playing. He enjoys their laughter and he laughs too, as they chase each other across the lawn having a high old time. He sits in a deckchair, quietly enjoying the visitors, raising his hand to wave as they dart off into the shadows.
He closes his eyes, as if closing the vision of the garden and it occurs to me that these children 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 feeling that the world we knew is disappearing. The children will soon stop playing in the garden.
In the afternoons we watch television shows about car boot sales and antiques. He shook his head, horrified by what he saw, and turned to look at the garden birds instead. “Why would anyone want to waste their lives with all that junk?” I stopped reminding him that he sold junk for a living because it excites him. He can enter 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 sunand he says he has never been to Spain. There are pictures of him on Spanish holidays with my mother. He doesn’t seem to remember my mother.
Sometimes I go upstairs and rummage through cupboards and cupboards where I find things like thimbles and old coins and put them in my pocket. It feels important to collect small treasures, things he touched and preserved. In a suitcase in my childhood room I find gummy cards, seashells and Christmas cracker trinkets, each object with memory.
He calls for help and I go downstairs and find him crouched under 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 found it. “They were here the whole time!” He is relieved. When he asks me if I found anything interesting upstairs, I empty my pockets and show him the little treasures. He touches each enchanted object and then looks at my arthritic hands, wondering what’s wrong with them but not finding 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 is back at work. The days go on forever 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 is failing and the list keeps growing: two types of arthritis, coronary artery disease, osteoporosis, skin cancer. In a house of broken gutters and downspouts, rain in the hall, cracks in the gable and a collapsing garage, we live in a time of endings, and I’m beginning to believe this broken house is us.
After the death of my mother, I did not go home for 17 years. Dad didn’t want anyone visiting. His heart was broken and he didn’t know how to fix it or explain how much it hurt. I’d meet him at the auction house and then we’d go for a pint in the Rose & Crown, and we’d mostly sit in silence, as we always did. Silence suited us. We got along well but didn’t feel the need to talk. Or maybe it was easier not to. Then we load the van with furniture and go our separate ways.
When I finally went home, while he was in the hospital after a fall, I returned to the home of a hoarder. Every room was full of furniture from floor to ceiling. In the middle of this labyrinth of closets and cupboards there was an armchair and a kettle. Lost without my mother, he filled the void with Victorian furniture and crockery. Effectively, he filled the empty space with sadness. And then, with increasing frailty and the isolation of Covid, he became his own ghost, a lost soul in a labyrinth of wardrobes.
I’m torn between not wanting to be here and feeling like this is the most important place to be. We look at the birds – the real birds – in the garden, the wood pigeons and blackbirds, the goldfinches and sparrows, the occasional exciting visit from the woodcutter. This is his only pleasure. Well, that and the drawer full of spoons.
Soon my sister will be home from work and we will be eating our Marks & Spencer microwave dinner while Dad disappears back into dementia land and falls asleep as the long day finally comes to an end. We sleep in the quiet house, hoping he sleeps through the night. When he do wakes up and calls for help, he doesn’t seem to know who we are. His long life was not 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 am in charge of death. Guilty, I hope he gets his wish.
I get a photo of my parents on a bike in Amsterdam – Dad smuggling, Mom on the back “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 mother. He looked at me confused and said softly, “She looks like a very nice lady, I think she might have been my wife…”
I went home to get a little sleep when my sister calls at 4am to tell me that Dad’s wish came true. I think how much I want to sit with him again, watch his fascination as he looks through the cutlery drawer, hold each piece up to the light like a child on Christmas Day, shake his head slightly and say: “It’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 through the spoons and watch.
Wild Twin by Jeff Young is published by Little Toller Books at £20. Buy a copy for £18 guardianbookshop.com
