There’s a lot of jarring reminders in her
medical appointments that make you aware that this journey will take a long time and become very hard to process. Questions like ‘Can she wash herself?’, ‘Does she need
help dressing herself?’ and ‘Can she go to the toilet unaided?’ are reminders
that however bad we think it’s getting, it’ll still get a lot worse.
Something I hadn’t really anticipated is the way in which
she challenges ideas of what’s socially acceptable. She walks out the front
door in her pyjamas, pinches things from the front gardens of neighbours (if
any of you are reading this, I’m so sorry!), and will stop and talk to anyone
who walks past the house, especially if they have kids.
To strangers, she comes across as odd and I find myself cringing sometimes at her behaviour, like a typical, embarrassed Brit. But those who know
about her affliction are amazing with her, herding her back to her front door,
sitting and talking to her when she decides to sit at their table at the pub, returning
the odd possession that has appeared in their recycling box outside their house.
To you understanding folks in St Margarets, I’m eternally grateful. Thank you. My
faith in human nature has been restored.
But there is one aspect of her behaviour we all find more
challenging than the rest - her complete love affair with alcohol. It’s perhaps
the most jarring of things, more uncomfortable to witness than suggesting I’m a threat to her
‘new man’ (her husband of thirty years and my father), or that my brother is my
partner, or that she’s had yet another man come to the front door proposing to
her. It’s probably the absurdity of those confused ideas that make them far
easier to ignore.
She obsesses over it, constantly on the hunt for wine
in the fridge, pinching other people’s glasses when she’s finished her own,
snatching bottles from tables and hiding them around the house. We have aptly
nicknamed her ‘Vintage Trouble’ and trouble she can be. She has entered into
the stubborn phase of this illness, refusing to go places, not giving up on an
idea until she gets what she wants or loses her train of thought, not letting
go of the idea of a glass of wine because she ‘hasn’t had a drink in months!’
(Some may see this post as being disloyal to Dee, but I feel that in the interest of keeping this blog an open and useful tool for anyone going through a similar situation, it's an important development to document. And I think Dee would understand.)
I'd like to point out that although she behaves like one, I still wholeheartedly believe Dee is not an alcoholic. I feel like one must be aware of what they’re doing and the Dee that
we all knew and loved would never give in to this behaviour if she still had
the mental capacity to. Unfortunately, as with everything else in this wonderful
woman, the ability to recognise she’s been drinking or remember that she’s had
a bottle of wine already have both faded away. Instead, we’re faced with an
unending battle to try and curb her drinking in an attempt to keep her more
mentally sound for just a little bit longer.
The problem has become all encompassing, and she can no longer live in denial. Dee said to me yesterday, ‘I’m becoming a child’ and it was the first moment in a long while where the glint of the normal Dee was in her eye. Just a very brief moment of normal Dee. Haven't seen that in a long time.
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