Monday 14 December 2015

N is for Normal

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.

But we’re also taking away the one thing that makes her feel normal. Or at least as close to normal as possible. Everything else around her is becoming more frightening and strange and this must be one feeling that she recognises. She’s in a perpetual state of anxiousness and can’t stop wandering around, moving things, tidying up, asking if everyone’s alright, asking what the plan is for the day. I suppose, in a strange way, her deterioration is at a point where even her own warped thinking can’t hide it from her.

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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