The Little Girl in the Radiator: Mum Alzheimer's & Me (18 page)

WE LOCKED THE DOOR and set off straight
away for Charnwood House. As we pulled into the car park and stopped, I was
struck by its neatly-clipped lawns and flower beds. The building was a solid,
one-storey affair, too; there was no issue of dangerous stairways for the
visiting relative to consider.

‘This looks nice,’ said Heather.

We crossed the asphalt and rang the bell to
the main reception. A voice came through on the intercom a couple of seconds
later.

‘Can I help you?’

‘We’ve come to look around,’ I said, and the
front door clicked softly open.

We entered a spacious hallway and were met
by a middle-aged lady with a ready smile and kind eyes.

‘Welcome to Charnwood House,’ she said,
shaking our hands. ‘Let me show you around.’

Our guide ushered us through a set of coded
security doors into an open and expansive seating area, which was
fresh-smelling and tidy. A few elderly residents were dotted here and there;
mostly, they were sound asleep. A fairly forgettable but pleasant melody was
playing quietly over the speaker system.

‘We hold our bingo sessions and our
sing-songs in here,’ she said. ‘As you can see, it’s very light and spacious…
There’s a nice atmosphere, don’t you think?’

There was: this place was the opposite of
mum’s former home. Where that had been dark and depressing, this was light and
cheerful. Where that had been a rabbit warren of narrow, cold corridors and steep,
winding staircases, this was a giant, open-planned bungalow. Where that had
been an old house converted to lock in elderly patients with dementia, this was
a purpose-built facility for their comfort and welfare. Heather and I knew then
we had made the right decision in moving mum. I knew she would love it here.

‘This is another lounge, which we also use
as the dining room,’ said our host, as we wandered down the large central
corridor. ‘We have two spare rooms... Let me show them to you.’

The bedrooms, like the rest of the building,
were nicely painted, bright and comfortable. They looked more like the cabins
on a cruise ship than the bedrooms of a care home. Captain John would have been
right at home here. We carried on, and passed a hairdressing salon.

‘Each Wednesday a very good ladies’
hairdresser works in there,’ said our guide, ‘so your mother can have her hair
done. Once a month we have a visiting chiropodist and a dentist.’

I thought about the non-existent facilities
of mum’s previous home; how could they be so different? 

‘What do you think?’ asked our guide. ‘Would
she be comfortable here?’

‘Absolutely,’ replied Heather.

‘Definitely,’ said I, and the deal was done.

* * * * *

We installed mum the following day.

‘This is a beautiful hotel,’ she observed,
looking around. ‘How on earth can we afford to stay here?’

‘Let me worry about that,’ I replied.

‘I’ll ask them if I can have breakfast in
bed tomorrow morning,’ whispered mum, as we showed her to her new room. It had
a lovely view over a vast flowerbed and rose garden. ‘Are you
sure
we
can afford to stay here?’ she asked again, looking out of the window. ‘It must
cost a fortune.’

‘This is your home now, mum,’ replied
Heather. ‘Better than the last place, isn’t it?’

Mum nodded. ‘I didn’t like that other
place,’ she said.

Heather and I looked at each other.

‘I hope she’s nice,’ said mum, pointing to
the other single bed in the room.

‘That bed’s not used,’ I said. ‘I’ve already
asked about it. It’s just a spare bed they have put in here. You have this room
all to yourself.’

 ‘I hope she isn’t going to snore all night,
and keep me awake,’ said mum, ‘or I’ll have to tell her.’

‘There won’t
be
anyone in that bed,’
I said. ‘There’s just you in here.’

‘And if she starts talking in her sleep,
I’ll give her such a dig in the ribs!’ announced mum.

From her very first day at Charnwood House
to her last, mum continued to believe she was staying in a top-class hotel. She
thought all the nursing staff were waiters and waitresses, and she used to tell
the other ‘guests’ that I had won the lottery, and was keeping her in luxury.
It was a delusion I did not contradict.

We put what was left of mum’s clothes into
her wardrobe, and we started to settle her in. Then there was a knock on the
door.

‘I would like to take mum around and
introduce her to everyone,’ said a young nurse. ‘Let’s see if we can make her
some new friends.’

Heather and I smiled, and mum took the
nurse’s hand like a child, and the two of them went off together.

‘I can rest easier, knowing she’s being looked
after in here,’ I said to Heather.

‘We should bring down some photographs and
personal ornaments, that sort of thing, to put in her room,’ remarked Heather.
‘It will make the place more personal to her.’

‘We need to buy her some more clothes too,’
I said.

Heather nodded. ‘Let’s go shopping.’

We spent a small fortune replacing as many
as we could of the items which had either been lost or ruined in the previous
home. We took the clothes and toiletries back to the bungalow with us so we
could write mum’s name on all the labels before giving them to her. We decided
to give her a settling-in week, as before, and so the following weekend we paid
mum her first visit in her new home.

‘I want you to write me a letter,’ announced
mum, the moment we arrived.

Here we go again, I thought.

‘Every morning they come in and wake us up
for breakfast. I always get up straight away, but that poor woman always wants
a lie in.’ She pointed to the other bed in her room.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well,’ mum went on indignantly, ‘because
she won’t get up when they call her, they come in and drag her out of bed by
her feet!’ Heather and I tried not to laugh. ‘They shouldn’t be dragging old
people out of bed like that in the morning, should they?’

We agreed that they really shouldn’t.

Mum went to her bedside table and brought
back a sheet of plain paper and a pen. I knew she would want me to write the
letter there and then. I composed the complaint, supervised the whole time by
mum looking over my shoulder.

‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know,’ replied mum. ‘She never
speaks to me.’

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about the way
Mrs Slevin’s room-mate is dragged out of her bed by her feet every morning.
Obviously this is contrary to the Health & Safety at Work Act, as this lady
could easily bump her head when she hits the floor. This is distressing to Mrs
Slevin, and we would request that you get the lady up in some other way.

Faithfully,

Martin Slevin.

‘That’s a very good letter,’ announced mum
when we were finished. ‘You have to stick up for your friends, you know.’

‘How are you settling in?’ asked Heather.

‘The food is lovely,’ replied mum,
enthusiastically, ‘but I’d expect no less from such a swanky hotel.’

‘I’m glad you like it here,’ I said.

‘Why wouldn’t I like it?’ asked mum. ‘The
waiters are very friendly and the service is always first class.’

‘We’ve brought you some cream cakes,’ said
Heather. We had stopped at a baker’s on the way and had bought a box of five
various fancies.

‘We can have one each and there will be two
over, maybe your mum can give the other two to some friends,’ Heather had said.

‘Oh, that’s wonderful, Wendy!’ exclaimed
mum. ‘Let’s have them now.’

She opened the box and took out a cream cake
which she devoured in about two gulps. After I had wiped the cream off her
face, she chose another.

‘I’ve accepted Frank’s proposal of
marriage,’ she said in a matter-of-fact way, between bites of a chocolate
éclair. ‘At my time of life, I have to think about the future, don’t I?’

‘I suppose you do,’ agreed Heather.

‘Who’s Frank?’ I said.

‘My fiancée, of course!’ replied mum, giving
me a slightly pitying look and selecting a huge custard slice.

‘You’ve met Frank in here, then?’ asked
Heather.

Mum nodded vigorously. Her mouth was full of
pastry and cold custard. ‘He’s a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force,’ she
said, proudly. ‘We’re going to live on a fighter base when we’re married.’

‘That’s nice, mum,’ I replied.

‘I want you to arrange for a priest to come
and do the service,’ said mum. ‘When can you get him here?’

‘Leave it with me,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll sort it
out tomorrow.’

‘Quick as you can, Richard. I don’t want to
look too pregnant when I go down the aisle,’ said mum, taking the fourth cake
from the box.

‘But you’ve only just met this man, Frank,
mum,’ I said, and immediately regretted trying to inject some logic into the
proceedings.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked mum.
‘We’ve known each other since school. We’ve been engaged for years! No, it’s
high time we did the decent thing and made it all official. Besides,’ she
whispered, taking the fifth and final cake from the box, ‘people are starting
to talk.’

We showed mum the new clothes we had bought
her, and hung them up in her wardrobe.

‘They’re beautiful!’ she said. ‘But you
shouldn’t spend so much money on me.’

‘You have to have something to wear,’ I
replied.

‘Well, confidentially,’ she whispered, ‘I
have noticed that some of the guests here don’t really dress that well. No-one
seems to dress up any more these days, even when staying at a top hotel like this
one. There are no standards any more.’

I nodded. That was something both Heather
and I had noticed since we first started to visit care homes. Most of the
patients of such places did seem to be dressed very poorly. I suppose there’s
some truth in what the nurse at the previous home had said – because the
patients are in and out of each other’s rooms all the time, borrowing things
and never returning them, their relatives take the view that it isn’t worth
providing decent clothes. Given that most dementia patients couldn’t care less
how they look, anyway, is there any point in keeping up appearances?

‘Well, you look very nice, anyway, Rose,’
said Heather diplomatically.

‘Thank you, Wendy,’ replied mum. ‘With
Richard having such an important job, I think I owe it to him to look my best.’

‘What important job have I got?’ I asked.

‘You know, with the animal training, and the
bullfighting, and all that,’ mum said, nodding at me conspiratorially.

‘Bullfighting?’ said Heather.

‘Yes, you know, he does bullfighting for
Coventry City Council. It’s a very important job. Everyone knows that. Don’t
they, Richard?’

I just nodded.

‘Someone has to keep all them mad cows under
control,’ observed mum, ‘or the place would be overrun with… with… ’

‘Mad cows?’ I ventured.

‘Exactly!’ agreed mum.

 ‘Have you made any more friends?’ asked
Heather. ‘Apart from Frank, I mean.’

When talking to dementia patients you
quickly fall into the habit of regularly changing the subject before your brain
starts to melt.

‘Oh yes!’ exclaimed mum. ‘People are so
friendly here. Apart from Mrs Whatshername, who’s a right bitch. And the other
little sneak. She comes in here and steals all my sweets, so now I hide them.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ I said.

‘What friends have you got then?’ pursued
Heather.

‘I have plenty. There’s old Mrs Fatbelly,
she’s very nice. She tells me things about the other guests. Do you know what
she told me the other day?’

‘No.’ I said. I couldn’t even begin to
guess.

‘She said that yer woman…’ Mum jerked her
head in the general direction of the door. ‘Yer woman murdered all of her
husbands for their insurance money. Isn’t that a horrible thing to do? There
ought to be a law against that!’

‘There
is
a law against it, mum.’

‘Well, she’s done away with three of them,’
she whispered. Then she leant in closer. ‘But she’s really very nice when you
get to know her.’

HEATHER HAD BEEN living at mum’s bungalow
with me and trying to sell her own house. As neither of us really wanted to
live at the bungalow any more, we decided to look for a place of our own –
somewhere we could both make a fresh start.

We began house-hunting in earnest, and in
the February of the following year we found a house that we both liked in
Nuneaton, a small town a few miles north of Coventry. Heather’s place had been
sold in the meantime, and we bought the new home and moved in. Mum’s bungalow
was put up for sale, and an era for both Heather and myself came to an end.

Heather’s ex-husband had owned a pair of
cats, Smokey and Sandy, and they had been left with her when the marriage broke
up. Heather had also taken on a couple of other moggies – Sprite and Tabitha –
when her daughters had left home. Finally, my own daughter Rebecca had owned
Barney, and he had wound up staying with me when Wendy and I had split up. To
cut a long story short, when Heather and I moved to Nuneaton, we somehow took
five cats with us. Cats are like that.

Sandy
was a ginger
tom who had been the runt of his litter; Heather and her family had nursed him
back to health with TLC and many tender words whispered into his pointy little
ears and, as a result, Sandy had become so responsive to a human voice that
whenever anyone spoke to him he answered them back. One afternoon, I found
myself in the front garden of the new house digging holes for Heather to pop
plants into. The local infant school was emptying out, and gangs of small
children were filing past on their way home. As Heather and I were chatting, Sandy was joining in with the conversation, as he invariably did, and I suddenly noticed
that a small group of girls, around six years of age, had stopped behind me,
and were listening. I thought I would have a bit of fun with them, and carried
on talking, not to Heather, but to Sandy instead.

‘So, Sandy, what did you say to that?’ I
asked.

‘Meow, meow, meow.’

‘Really? So what happened then?’

‘Meow, meow, meow,’ explained Sandy.

There was an excited mutter behind me. This
was fun.

‘No! You don’t say... And did you fix the
problem?’

‘Meow, meow, meow,’ replied Sandy.

‘Well, I hope they were grateful to you,’ I
said, nodding at the cat.

And so it went on, me saying any old
rubbish, and Sandy meowing perfectly on cue, as though answering me. Within a
few minutes, there were gasps of excitement from the little group, who
dispersed when their mothers arrived to take them home.

I thought no more about it, until the next
Monday afternoon when there was a knock on the door. A pretty young woman stood
there, hand-in-hand with one of the girls I recognised from the group who had
listened to Sandy and me.

‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you,’ began
the young woman, ‘but all I’ve heard all weekend is, “When can we see the
talking cat?” Just for the sake of peace, I thought I would knock the door, I
hope you don’t mind.’

‘Sure,’ I said, and invited them in. They
stood in the kitchen, and I put Sandy on a chair.

‘Sandy,’ I said. ‘This young lady has come
to see you, isn’t that nice?’

‘Meow, meow, meow.’

Gasps from the little girl.

‘Sandy says thank you very much… He doesn’t
get many visitors.’

‘Meow, meow, meow.’

‘He says you’re a very nice little girl, and
he hopes you always do as your mummy tells you.’

The young mum laughed, and the little girl
was enthralled. Sandy continued to chatter away until he got bored with the
game and ran off, but by then the little girl was more than ever convinced that
we had a fantastic talking cat in our house. I could imagine the conversation
in the school playground the following morning.

It wasn’t until about a week later, when I
was visiting mum, that something suddenly dawned upon me. We had been talking
about the little girl in the radiator, and once again I had been going along
with it.

‘She tells me that people don’t really
listen to her stories any more,’ said mum, looking wistfully at the radiator.

‘Is that so?’ I replied. ‘Why does she think
that?’

Then it hit me – that I was playing a game
like that I’d played with the kids the week before. Then I’d had Sandy as a stooge, and the children – their immature intellects too young to spot the trick
– had been easily duped. I was doing the same thing with mum. I was enforcing
and supporting her delusion by playing along with it and she – her mind having
regressed to its childhood capacity – was too infected with her Alzheimer’s to
spot the trick.

This is the dilemma of the talking cat, as I
call it. Is it morally right to go along with your patient’s delusions, just
for the sake of a peaceful life? Or is it better to challenge whenever they
arise, so that you are constantly dragging them back into your reality, and
thereby upsetting and perhaps even frightening them, by being more concerned
with your truth than their happiness?

Everyone who takes on the heavy burden of
caring for a loved one like this will face this dilemma, sooner or later. They
may try the second route instinctively first; it is when a challenge causes
conflict to arise within the relationship – don’t forget, the delusion is the
patient’s reality – that the carer may think twice.

The trouble is that, especially early in the
evolution of a relative’s condition, it upsets us to hear what is, objectively,
nonsense talked by a person about whom we care so much – a person who would
never have dreamt of saying such things before. We want the disease to go away,
and our loved one to return to the stable mental state of old, when all was
well. We want the person we remember returned to us; their delusions sharply
remind us that this can never happen. I think the Alzheimer’s fantasy is almost
an attack on our own memories, an assault on our own love, and an evil that
needs to be fought and resisted.

Not long after mum moved to her second home,
I challenged the validity of the little girl in the radiator. I’m not sure why
– I think it was done instinctively, without any serious thought at all.

‘I don’t know why you keep going on about
that stupid girl inside the radiator,’ I remember saying. ‘There can be no such
thing.’

It was a brutal rebuttal, delivered with the
mighty strength of pure ignorance.

Mum had looked hurt, shocked, and horrified
all at once. She closed down, refused to speak again, and distanced herself so
quickly from me that I was left sitting there feeling as though I had let a
bomb go off. I tried to build a bridge straight away, but made it out of paper
as I tried to reinforce my point by arguing the logic of it. I could not have
handled it any more incompetently if I had planned to do so.

‘Surely you must realise no little girl
could possibly live in there?’ I said, pointing to the slim radiator on the
wall.

Mum turned her head away, looked out of the
window and did not reply. She was now somewhere else entirely, and all contact
with her was lost.

‘Mum, just think about it logically for a
moment,’ I persisted.

When you find yourself standing in a massive
hole, it’s wise to stop digging. Mum moved her head further away from my
direction, and folded her arms. She reminded me of a child refusing point-blank
to eat her dinner. Even I knew then that my position was hopeless. I changed
the subject.

‘Do you want a chocolate?’ I asked, holding
out a freshly-opened box. Mum had always loved her sweets and chocolates, and
even the ravages of her mental condition had been unable to take that away from
her. I could usually win her over with confectionery. She simply shook her head
in silence. All hope of reconnecting for the time being now really was lost.

‘I’d better go then,’ I said.

I leaned over and kissed her. ‘I’ll see you next time,’ I
said, and left.

I never challenged her again. We all have
our own private delusions, anyway; it’s just that Alzheimer’s patients have
them to a marked degree. And to point out the obvious to her could solve
nothing; it would never change her mind and instead would only create conflict,
and widen the gap between us. All my little pet theories about handling mum,
and Alzheimer’s patients in general, were born like this, out of trial and
error; no-one had written a book for me, and I often thought later that life
would have been so much simpler if they had. The dilemma of the talking cat,
despite its quirky name, is a real problem that all carers eventually have to
face. How you deal with it… well, you make up your own mind.

* * * * *

I visited mum every week; usually at the weekends, but if I
could manage it I would often drop in during the week as well. I decided that I
would visit her sooner rather than later this time to try to repair some of the
damage I had done to our relationship by challenging the concept of the little
girl in the radiator. I had been thinking about the episode constantly, and had
decided it was futile to challenge the logic of her fantasies. It solved
nothing; it would not change her mind and could only widen the gap between us.

I visited her on the following Wednesday afternoon, my mind
made up that I would act as if the previous visit had never happened; I would
not apologise for it, nor allude to it in any way. My hope was that, because
her short-term memory was so fragile, if I did not remind her of it she might
not recall it either.

‘Hi, mum!’ I said cheerily. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Oh, Richard!’ she exclaimed, her face breaking into a huge
smile. ‘How lovely to see you.’

All was well.

It was a little awkward at first, as I could never be
completely sure whether or not she remembered the details of previous visits.
If she had, then she made a very good job of pretending, and it was my guess
that the events of only a few days ago were just so much of her forgotten
history now; they may as well have happened a thousand years before.

Mum glanced periodically at the small, white
enamel radiator on her bedroom wall. I thought I should broach the subject that
stood between us, and tackled it head-on, but in a different way this time.

‘Have you been talking to the little girl in
there again?’ I asked.

Mum nodded her head vigorously. ‘She talks
to me all the time,’ she said.

‘How is she doing today?’ I asked.

‘She’s not so sad today,’ replied mum.

Her face had softened into a gentle look and
was graced by an easy smile. The difference between the way she looked now, and
the face she had offered to me at the time of my last visit was so marked that
they could have belonged to two completely different people.

‘What do you two find to talk about all
day?’ I asked.

‘We talk about all sorts of things,’ replied
mum, warming to her favourite subject. ‘We chat all the time. She understands
lots of things, you know. Grown-ups don’t always realise how much children
actually do know. They don’t miss a trick!’

‘Do you ever hear her say things that upset
you?’

‘Never!’ Mum seemed very determined on this
point. ‘When she tells me things I know that they’re true, so they don’t upset
me even if I don’t like what she says sometimes.’

‘What has she said that you didn’t like,
mum?’

Mum seemed to be contemplating the question
for a moment.

‘She whispers things to me sometimes, when
it’s dark, late at night and there are just the two of us in the room, and when
no-one else can hear us.’

‘What did she say to you that you didn’t
like though?’

‘She said that everyone on the outside
thinks that we’re all mad in here, and we’re not. Well, I’m not anyway.’

‘No, of course you’re not mad, and people on
the outside don’t think that you are, anyway,’ I said.

‘Then why would she say such a thing?’ asked
mum. ‘If it wasn’t true?’

‘Maybe she was just playing a joke on you.’

‘Yes, that must be it,’ replied mum, nodding
in agreement.

She fell into a thoughtful silence, her mind
fully engaged with thoughts of her little friend.

There was a soft knock on the door. A young
nurse in a smart blue uniform popped her head around the door.

‘Rose, we’re starting to serve our evening
meal now, in the lounge,’ she said. ‘Would you like to have yours in your room,
or are you going to join the others?’

‘No, I’ll come down,’ replied mum.

The nurse closed the bedroom door quietly
behind her.

‘I have to go for my supper now,’ said mum.
‘Will you come down and have a bite with us?’

‘No, I’d better be going.’ I said.

‘Come and meet my friends, then,’ said mum.

We left her room arm-in-arm, and walked the
short distance to the TV lounge where supper was being served.