An Act of Remembrance

On Thursday, 11 May, my play, The Things We Never Said, will go out on BBC Radio 4, starring Lia Williams and Siân Phillips.  In years gone by, mum would have been thrilled to share such news, would have tuned in with excitement, and called me after to enthuse about the performance.  Even if it was not to her taste, I suspect, she would have praised it anyway – for I was her beloved daughter.

This time, there will be none of that.  Mum won’t listen, or even know it’s on; I won’t tell her, as it will mean nothing.  And yet it’s a play all about her, about “us” – the people we were, and the strangers we have become.

I have written here before about that journey of unknowing, the subtle, devastating difference between recognition and connection; mum and I have now drifted further apart in that bleak and lonely landscape… 

Such fracture would have been unthinkable to either of us twenty years or more ago. Both only children (mum widowed, I single), we were each other’s only immediate family, each other’s best friend.  But somehow, in those twenty years, the umbilical cord of all our life’s experience started to detach.

Mum, as I best remember her... (Me, behind in the mirror)

Mum has been in residential care for over five years now.  The rupture began long before that.  I see it now, in odd, malevolent looks she would sometimes cast me, as we sat at home watching TV; in strangely inappropriate gifts, more suited to a child; in wild rages and accusations of uncharacteristic vitriol; in the bewilderment on her face, when I let myself in with my key.  Now I see: already, she didn’t know who I was.

Back then, in our family home, she still had the social facility to cover it up, pretend to be “au fait” (one of her favourite phrases).  She took her cues from the context: this woman is in the house; she knows me; I must know her.  And (crucially) there’s no-one else here… 

Looking back, I realise that around this time she stopped driving conversation.  Always a prodigious and entertaining talker, she became, not mute, but unusually tight-lipped.  As if there were some passive-aggressive sulk going on beneath the surface – a silent antagonism that said I had done her some inexplicable wrong. 

When I served her meals, she would thank me courteously, somehow too polite, ingratiating almost; and as she ate, she might look up now and again and comment, “this is very nice, thank you”, with a gracious nod of the head.  I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but now I see: she was addressing me as a waitress.

Yet this unspoken estrangement didn’t make her less dependent on me.  On the contrary.  She became unbearably clingy.  Increasingly unsteady on her feet, she would refuse a stick on trips out, preferring to clutch limpet-like to my arm.  At home, I could hardly leave the room by myself, let alone the house.  On days when I had to drive back to my own flat in London, it would take until mid-afternoon to extricate myself from her maddening ploys to stall me.  As I finally pulled away down the road, I would find myself screaming in the car.

My mother’s (as yet undiagnosed) illness trapped us both and locked us away from the world.  Her intense, suffocating neediness convinced me that I was uniquely necessary to her and any attempt to regain my own independence would mean abandonment of her.  It caused terrible guilt and trauma when those needs became too great for me to manage alone and I had to place her in care.  I feared she would never settle, the distress would be too much.  But in fact she has done well. 

She needed someone with her 24/7.  She needed someone.  She didn’t need me. 

In those latter years in our own home, mum relied on me not as myself, as “Ming”, or even her daughter; she relied on me as her carer (though she never saw it as that) - the person who shopped, and cooked, and cleaned, did the washing, managed the builders, handled the boring finance and admin; the person who always came when she called, who generally kept her alive.  She relied on me, just as I had relied on her, as an unknowing helpless baby.  That most primeval impulse: to reach out to the one who nurtures, cry out in the darkness for “Mummy!”

Rewind a decade or so, to when I worked on the TV series EastEnders.  Each new episode of mine would delight her, after I’d become blasé.  She’d call her friends, tell shop assistants, write proud notes in her diary: “Ming’s EastEnders today!  Very good!!”  A few years on, things had changed, although I didn’t understand it then.

One Saturday night, I was visiting for the weekend; we’d gone out early to eat.  I had an episode of Casualty on and wanted to get back quickly to watch.  Mum showed no interest in the programme.  In fact, she paid no attention – just carried on with her crossword, talked all through the dialogue, dozed off for a while.  And when it was over, nothing.  I was hurt, I have to confess.  (OK, so it’s not Shakespeare, but come on, you’re my mum!)  I too said nothing, though.  What could I say?  I told myself she was getting on and could be forgiven for dozing off; and it was just another episode of soap.  Not big news any more…

A few months later: another episode of something.  This time, I was in London.  As the credits rolled, the phone rang.  It was mum, as usual.  But she didn’t mention the show.  We chatted for some time, and finally I asked, “Did you see it then?”  “See what?”  I named the programme. “Oh, yes”, she said flatly.  “Well, what did you think?”  A long, blank pause.  “Not much”, she said at last.  “Stupid story, wasn’t it?”

By then, I realised she had forgotten that any of these programmes were anything to do with me, if she was aware of them at all.  She didn’t mean to be unkind.  But still it did hurt.  Because I had to ask myself, are these her honest thoughts?  Is this what she really thinks of my work, stripped of motherhood’s indulgence? 

Now I visit her in the care home most weekends.  For the first two years, this encroaching “unknowingness” existed alongside our old relationship.  She would not remember the context of my life or our relationship outside those visits, or the visits themselves once I’d gone.  But in the bubble of those few hours over lunch and then tea, we were still mother and daughter – even if, in her eyes, I was the former and she the latter. 

Christmas 2013 marked another watershed.  Each week, I would find mum in the lounge, already seated at the table by the staff for me to join her for our lunch.  Her mobility now greatly impaired, she had acceded to a wheelchair in recent weeks, so I was doubly surprised to meet her walking (stick-less!) toward me down the corridor from the lounge.  I went to take her arm; and instinctively she recoiled, her face aghast with mistrust.  “What’s the matter?”, I asked.  But as I said it, I knew. “It’s me”, I said. “I’m Ming.”  “Ming?”, she said, bewildered.  “Oh, Ming…”  It did come back, but I knew: out of the familiar context of the lounge, I could have been anyone. 

I hugged her to me; she hugged me back with skeleton arms.  “Don’t forget me”, I pleaded - though I knew I shouldn’t, it wasn’t a promise she could give.  “Please, don’t forget me!”  “How could I forget you?”, she said.  “You’re my Ming.  You’re my little girl.”

But by the spring she had.

So where are we now?  What am I to her?  It’s impossible to say.  Dementia is not a one-way street; it has countless meandering byways.

On a good day, mum will greet me with pleasure and say I’m “a lovely girl”, regardless of who I am.  Sometimes she’ll call me by name, as if I’d just stepped out for a moment and we can pick up where we left off.  But there’s no root to that knowledge.  It’s no more than a reflex.

We don't talk much; I have to accept it must be on her terms, her life before I was born.  Now even those memories of her youth, the stories she told me about herself, are remembered only by me.  What she yearns for most are her parents – and I can’t give her that.

So I put on a CD; TV is too much stress.  A former singer, she still enjoys music, though not necessarily as before.  I bring flowers and cake, make her a cup of coffee; she used to drink tea like me, but so many tastes have changed…

There are things for which to be thankful.  As dementia shrinks down your world, small pleasures become more precious.  If the weather’s fine, I might wheel mum down to the garden and we’ll sit out there for a while.  We’ve only been able to do this a few times since last spring; she was bed-bound for eighteen months before.  So I treasure those rare occasions when mum can still enjoy the breeze, the birds, the warmth of sun on her face.  I enjoy that too.  But I can’t say we do it together.  Side by side we are separate now. 

This picture was one of those “good days”.  Dressed in her favourite bright pink jumper, hair newly washed, mum looks animated here, caught in mid-conversation.  Except she isn’t talking to me.  Her incessant stream of whispered monologue is directed at a person on the other side of her, whom only she can see.  Her hair looks nice; the staff have blow-dried it with care.  But it’s not her style, the mum I used to know; and if she looks at me, it’s with a stranger’s eyes…

The other week, I told a friend how hard I find this now - to see mum looking so changed.  “She’s ninety”, said my friend, “no-one looks the same”.  But it’s not just the physical change.  I look at other friends’ mothers of a similar age: white-haired, yes, and frailer, but still emphatically themselves.  Hairstyle, clothes, and make-up are only part of the equation.  I miss the light of connection in her eyes.

Another garden afternoon: mum is oblivious to me

We don’t share lunch any more.  Mum eats little and early.  I bring a sandwich to eat in her room; and in the awkward intimacy of that act, each bite audible in the silence, she watches me with something approaching distaste.  The mechanics of eating are not pretty, I admit.  Yet such clumsy-grotesque bodily function can be endearingly familiar in those we love.  Her distaste tells me I am no longer of her flesh.

On a bad day, she won’t engage with me at all.  Sometimes barely awake, others alert with antagonistic spark.  Last week, for something to say, I showed her a photo of us together that I’d glued to an Easter card (the written word mere hieroglyphics to her now). “I’m not interested!”, she said and batted it away.  On days like these, anything I say, everything I try, will be met with a blank, a dismissal – at best a humouring nod. 

That day, I slipped out early.  Across the fields at the back of the home, lambs bleated in the distance.  I walked down to take in the view; sat for a few minutes, breathing in the peace and cool air before my long journey back to the city.  How strange, I thought, to be sitting here on my own, while behind me there’s mum’s window, and behind that she will be sitting alone there too, oblivious to my presence a few short metres away. 

A couple of months ago, I had a review with the Court of Protection Visitor, who supervises appointed Deputies like me, who manage the financial affairs of a person lacking capacity.  As we went through the bank accounts, he asked me why I visited my mother so often (it’s a two-hundred-mile round trip).  I was taken aback.  Surely it’s obvious?  She’s my mum.  She’s ninety, in end stage dementia; I’m her only family. 

Yes, but what is the purpose of these visits, he persisted? 

I have to see how she is, I replied; to make sure she’s all right, that she has everything she needs.  You could do that by phone, he said.  Some deputies visit only once a year.  (If you are in care with no immediate family, your deputy may be a distant relative or legal professional.)  I was perplexed at this approach.  She’s forgetting me, I said; I come as often as I can to keep up the connection…

Is that for her though, he asked; or is it really for you? 

Afterwards, I realised that he wasn’t criticising me, merely pointing out the distinction between my legal obligations as deputy and the personal actions of a daughter.  But it gave me pause for thought. 

Every week, I drive down past the country pub where mum and I used to go for Sunday lunch; the spa hotel where she once booked us a swanky post-Christmas meal that proved to be a wash-out; the garden centre where we spent many a happy afternoon, choosing bedding plants and hanging baskets.  It’s as if I’m driving past our old life and it won’t let me in. 

Intimacy has gone; our shared history is erased.

My mother is not dead, but I mourn her every day.  I mourn myself too, and that long-gone life we shared.  But I will never abandon her.  I will never give up.  I will always continue to visit.  Why? 

Because I love her; and I know that she loved me.  I do this as an act of remembrance.

[In January 2018, the play won Best Radio Drama in the Writers' Guild Awards 2018. Listen to a discussion and extract from the play on BBC Radio 4 Fortunately (@ 10' 33") and read the script here via BBC WritersRoom.

There is also an updated version of this post as at April 2019.]