Erwin Mortier - Stammered Songbook - A Mother's Book of Hours

When they gave us pocket money for the summer fair, they couldn’t help adding: don’t waste the money. What they meant was: make sure that we don’t have to be even more ashamed.

My mother, daughter of shame.

Always that clumsy, half-mocking laugh when I tried to press my lips on her cheek. For a long time I cursed that shame, which she mixed in with our food, and its shadow side, self-reproach.

Now I lift her up out of the chair in the day-care centre. Veerle releases the table top and I lift her up.

Her feet thrash against my shins, and when I let her down she perches jauntily on my toes.

She is restless, as almost always these days. She wants to run in all directions at once. Until Veerle says: we’re going home, Mum. Home to Dad.

She calms down instantly. She more or less flops against me, with her head against my ribcage. I hear her breathing calming, I feel it in the threads of my shirt.

I give her a fond kiss on the forehead.

We’ve been expecting you for some time, says the lady from admissions, after offering my sister and me a chair in her office. But we don’t force anything. We never do that. The request must come from the family.

I saw also that your father was completely at the end of his tether.

The man had no strength at all left. Nothing left.

It still affects me to see a grown man, twenty years older than me, cry. Believe me.

He had absolutely no reserves left, your father.

Of course he felt guilty.

I said: we’ll try it for a week or so. Then we’ll see.

Now he realizes it’s the right thing too. For him too. But if she is admitted permanently in a little while, it will all come back.

There will always be guilt feelings, believe me.

She likes walking, your mother. Group activities are not for her. But she likes stepping out.

So every day, weather permitting, one of the duty staff goes walking with her.

We also put her in the multi-sensory bath. We close the curtains. The nurses light pleasantly scented candles, because you have to keep stimulating people with dementia. Especially pleasant, direct sensory stimuli.

That relaxes her.

As long as she can walk, your mother.

So everything there is, I always say, is still there.

If she moves in here permanently she’ll be put in a family group. We don’t believe in leaving people with dementia sitting in their rooms. If you had to sit looking at four walls, you might not be so happy either.

We have a movement therapist here, we ensure that our guests don’t stiffen up. And there are ergotherapists. Yes, there are still lots of things you can do together with people with dementia. In short bursts, depending on their ability to concentrate.

Sometimes there is cooking in the unit. The smell of fresh vegetable soup often makes them curious. Some lend a hand in chopping up the vegetables. Others don’t. We won’t be able to do it with your mother. But, anyway, if she’s there, she’s sure to pick up on the life around her.

I sometimes come into the unit when they’re cooking and tend to get angry because nothing is happening. Because the guests are not responding.

But then the therapists say: that’s what you think.

Smelling, they say, sniffing the smell of fresh soup, is also doing something.

We throw parties regularly here. It may be that when you come to visit her the central entrance hall is closed off and you have to enter by the side door. For example a couple of times a year we organize a marathon walk. We follow a route round the park.

It’s touching to see how much they enjoy it. There is still a group feeling among those people, however ill they may be. It’s natural, just as with us, and you should see their pleasure when they reach the finish line all together.

Then we close off the big entrance hall and give a party with drinks and snacks.

That’s the right way, I think.

Parties are important.

Don’t forget that.

Your mother is at present in category C/D. That is the highest grade. Needs constant care, and has dementia.

It’s a miracle that all of you and your father have held out for so long.

I’ll admit her as soon as there’s a place free. We have a hundred and sixty-two beds. We’re completely full, and there’s a long waiting list.

It’s not as nice working here as when I started thirty years ago.

Then I had perhaps forty admissions a year to arrange. That was always a pleasure. Now I have a hundred and thirty per year. I have to disappoint a lot of people.

It’s a huge problem. I sometimes wonder whether our politicians realize.

But I do what I can.

We go to collect her, my sister and I. In the day room she is sitting in her chair by the window. She constantly purses her lips and relaxes them again.

At a table a group of elderly ladies are playing cards.

A man says: don’t you live in H.?

I grew up there.

On what side of the tracks?

The right side.

He giggles.

Do you know what persuaded me most? asks Veerle, after we have hoisted her into the back seat of the car together.

No, I say.

At least it doesn’t smell of stale piss in there…

When I look at her, an unreal grimace cutting right across her mouth mocks me to my face. Impulses pass through nerve cells, playing on the muscles like puppets. I think of a fen in summer, half hidden in the shade of foliage. Green water. Now and then a gas bubble wells up. Leaves rot. A carp breaks the surface and gasps for breath.

Shortly, when she leaves for good. Shortly, when she is helped across the threshold (perhaps by us, her sons). When we have packed her case (her daughters, probably). When we open the gate for her, the door of the car, and someone takes hold of her under the shoulders and someone else lifts up her legs into the seat…

Will he then, our father, have to close the door behind her and turn the key?

I don’t know if I want to see her shuffling across the gravel, where the orchard used to be — one of my earliest memories: I am lying with her on a blanket and I’m sucking on the shells of freshly picked peas. The taste explosion of the raw green on my tongue, still as sharp as ever when I think back.

There were newborn lambs dancing around us.

It must have been the spring of 1966. Is it possible that I am remembering this, or is it one of the snatches of memory of someone else that roamed around there under that roof in the extensive firmament of memories in my earliest years?