Purple Prose (7 page)

This week we have spotted a new flower, a little in the distance. The rain has made the clay bright orange and spongy, the dams and small creeks are swollen, and there are large, milky brown puddles to navigate. Mum's walking trolley sinks into the ground, leaving wheel marks. I am watching her every step as closely as one watches a toddler taking their first steps. I am anxious. The risk is that, having got her out of the car, I won't get her back into it. Or she falls and I can't get her up again, out here in the bush, miles from anywhere. Finally we get there, to the Holy Grail of wildflowers. It is a delicate, pale purple orchid. We are exultant.

Back in the car I hand her a chocolate brownie. I have discovered my mother loves sweet things after a lifetime of apparent indifference to fine food. I am afraid I throw health piety to the winds and bring her chocolates, KitKats, Tim Tams … She polishes them off with relish – crumbs flying every which way. It has taken me a while to work out what kind of outing gives her pleasure. She is as puncturing of other people's good intentions as ever. Delicious lunches come and go without comment. With my daughter, I took her to the local art gallery to see a magnificent exhibition of Greek statues and artefacts from the British Museum. She looked hard at one of the two-thousand-year-old marble statues, with people cooing enchantment left and right. Unimpressed, she frowned and said, ‘It is very …
small
.'

When we return to the nursing home I wonder if she will remember these trips. But I dismiss it. Slowly I have learned that whether my mother remembers something is irrelevant. We all assume something like an inner camera recording experience and laying down memories is what makes an experience worthwhile. That is not really true. Long before the capacity for language or explicit memory develops, a very young child feels pleasure at a mother's embrace and the warmth and bright pricking light of a sunbeam, long before they can put a name to the sensation or can
remember what happens. The
feeling
of what happens – benign, pleasurable, vibrant, or angry, cold, hard – can be enough. For an older adult losing their memory, the ‘feeling of what happens' is again enough, even as they may not remember actual events. Our relation to experience can even be corrupted by the idea we must remember what happens or it is not worthwhile. And yet the consequences of good experiences are there. Without exactly being conscious of it at the time, I realise later my visits have been not only busy with practical aspects of care, but purposive in another way. I want my mother to inhabit that part of herself where she experiences being fully alive to the world. The best way, I have discovered through trial and error, is to give her music and take her out into nature. Out here in the vast, unending landscape of the Whipstick forest, there are no complaints.

If I were on an imaginary psychoanalyst's couch, doing a word association, the word which would fly out of my mouth at the prompt of the word purple would be
fidelity
.

The next word would be
grief
. I first really knew when she held up a standard kitchen grater that she had been using for eighty years and said, ‘What
is
this?' I paused from packing away the shopping, lifting my head out of the vegetable drawer of the fridge. I was staring at it, staring at her. The world wheeled sideways and for the briefest of moments the shock made time slow. The room went dark and then came back into focus. She was still waiting for my answer. Then I mustered a frozen smile and deliberately changed my voice so it did not register the inward shock, the
‘Oh no,'
and instead spoke in the rueful tone of humorous indulgence we might use for a loved one's everyday foibles. ‘Mum,' I said, as if amused, ‘
that
is a grater.' I made light of it. But later sitting in the car I covered my face with my hands and wept, giving full recognition to the meaning of not just that moment, but all the other moments of her growing thinner and thinner before I took over meal production, of sand to
repel ants spread all over the kitchen benches, of multiple phone calls and visits to sort out leaking roofs and simple maintenance, of minor car accidents and getting lost trying to find the street of her book club that she had been going to for many years. My highly intelligent mother was losing her memory.

Old age is a whole other countryside. Like small children at the beginning of the life cycle, people around an old person need to mobilise for their care and, as I have done many times in my life, I swing my full attention to my mother. In old age, however, it is more a case of un-development – of growing backwards, as one capacity after another becomes compromised, attenuated or disappears. I found myself open-mouthed, astonished, taken by surprise yet again as, one by one, an ability – to pay bills, or drive safely, or clean or clothe herself – disappeared. Long before the grater incident, I tried to stop my mother from doing much driving, especially long trips. We lived hours away from her, so I either travelled up to the country town where she lived or she came down by train to see me. The train trips have ceased. The reason is that, one day, outside the huge Southern Cross station in Melbourne, rather than wait for me to park and accompany her, she suddenly leapt out of the car, and scampered across the peak hour traffic in Flinders Street against a red light, taxis and cars skidding to a halt, honking and drivers screaming at her. At first I either drove her back or put her on the train at a small country station halfway, and someone collected her at the other end. Then even that became dicey, and from then on she could only be driven. It was like suddenly realising that a small child had acquired a new skill, and was about to squirm off the change table or climb out of a cot. One is often trailing afterwards, only what you are following is an unravelling, a movement towards unbeing, not becoming.

Like the period of life where very young children are present, work can still be done but you never know when a crisis, a fall, a stroke, or just being unable to cope with some small task, will blast it off course. I cut back on work, stop doing journalism, delay
a book, and disappoint my publisher. After much discussion, my mother bravely makes an anguished decision to sell her house so she can move closer to me, to a retirement village in Melbourne. For months I travel up and down preparing her house for sale, so many times I think my tyre marks are carved indelibly into the tarmac. We are full of hope though, as if we have defiantly swung our faces to a new future, that she will have a better life. Not long after she moves, any romance about this new life vanishes. The place offers far less help than they promise in the glossy brochures, and my mother needs far more help than any of us realised.

Keeping someone completely independent when their capacity for independent living is fast evaporating is a huge operation. Bit by bit, I set up an elaborate care network. Far-flung siblings help, we roster phone calls, visits … Sometimes, cleaning up her flat, I am what the Irish feminist Kathleen Lynch calls a ‘care foot soldier', but other times I am a ‘care commander', and feel like a field officer deploying troops as I either give or get help for every aspect of her life. The government help is skeletal. An assessment of ‘low care' means only four hours of assistance per week. It is a meaningless category, assigned when someone can merely walk to a bathroom or to a dining room. All the cosy sounding mantras of ‘ageing at home', a geriatrician quips scathingly to me, really means ‘ageing at your own expense'. I am more preoccupied than any time since I had young children, only now I am continually anxious, scarcely able to work, and keep compulsively making long lists of what I need to take responsibility for. They keep expanding. Banking. Stamps. Underwear. Socks. I first have to find and then pay the bills discovered in disconnected piles of paper. I make up rosters to pin on the fridge so she remembers activities each day, but worry over the indignity. Mum has got lost shopping, even in a group of residents, so I online shop and have it delivered, or bring it with me. Some fellow residents are inexpressibly kind, but others are cold and censorious, perhaps fearing a glimpse into their possible future. Another resident has put in a complaint, that Mum is
dishevelled. She tells one sister pointedly that, as the village is for ‘independent living', Mum should be elsewhere. We are all livid but redouble our anxious efforts to keep Mum clean. She simply doesn't notice, so as tactfully as possible I have to look through her wardrobe, find dirty items to throw in the tub. My sisters do the same. Then outfits are laid out each day between me and the council carers so she can wear fresh clothing down to morning coffee. Cleaning, medical appointments, dentists, specialists, aged care assessments … It takes hours on the phone each week just to organise it all, or to deal with local council bureaucracy to arrange meals-on-wheels, carers and cleaners. With frightening speed, even all that is not enough.

After a mild stroke and a fall which lands Mum in hospital, she is told by a kind, gruff but straight-shooting geriatrician that he doesn't think she can live independently. He asks whether she trusts me. My mother straight away answers an emphatic yes. Her trust makes it one of the worst days of my life. I feel that I have failed her. She expresses the wish to go back to her country town, where she still has strong social networks. After many weeks of searching, a whole family effort, we find her an excellent nursing home, the very best we can find.

I have been researching her medications in case they are contributing to her confusion. One has sent up a red flag. I enlist her new GP, an unusually enterprising and attentive man who does not settle for her condition being simply old age. At my request he examines afresh my mother's medications that all the GPs, geriatricians and neurologists we have consulted have okayed. He changes one that he thinks is contributing to the problems. The change seems miraculous; she is suddenly able to finish sentences and remember enough to make new friends and to start reading again. In a structured environment, Mum surprises everyone and thrives, improving in every way. She continually expresses relief at no longer having to be responsible for the things in daily life she can't manage, as the carers whisk away dirty clothing and return
it freshly laundered. ‘Like Magic!' she says as cups of tea and meals appear in front of her. Everyone here is in the same boat; there is loving kindness, solidarity and no judgement. She remains embedded in the family, and between all of us on almost every day someone is in contact, while old friends rally and she remains in a social network going back fifty years. Sometimes her fiercely independent spirit surfaces. When my husband and I take her out to lunch one day, she is concerned about being driven by someone she doesn't know to a funeral of an acquaintance. Mum is worried about asking for help with her walker at the other end. My husband says that maybe she look at it another way; that people might feel pride in helping her, and that there should be a pride, not loss of dignity, in asking, that she has a
right to be looked after.
The right to dependence seems, in our independence-obsessed world, a radical but absolutely just idea. Perhaps ‘independent living' is idealised more than it should be.

On that imaginary analyst's couch, the other words which would fly out in connection with purple, would be
suffragettes
, because one of their symbols was the colour purple in garments they wore. But also
care,
because for me a feminism worth having has always included
justice
and
equality
for the vulnerable who need care and for their caregivers, but also because inequality in caregiving remains at the root of women's disadvantage. In reality, during all the years 2009 to 2015, I was struggling to do justice to my mother. If old age is a countryside, the care foot soldier's population is once again largely female. Daughters, not sons, are expected to do the care work, although there are a few exceptions. There are female carers and domestic helpers, and predominantly female care workers in aged-care facilities. I know families of several sons and one daughter, where it is the daughter who is expected to do the caring for the elderly, no matter what her profession or whether she lives interstate.