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

I’d so like to have a cheerfully demented mother. One of those good-humoured, ever-upbeat ladies who still go to the hairdresser’s, albeit at three in the morning. One of those cackling aunties or out-of-control grannies who wet themselves laughing and miss the cup when pouring tea — our Hollywood dementia patients.

I can’t stand them, the colour-photogenic senile models, the pin-ups of those countless books which prattle on with such insufferable exuberance about Alzheimer’s also creating opportunities. Give me anything, if necessary a moaning harpy, a Bacchanal of ungovernable surliness or lewd talk. Not this wreck of a woman, so lean and emaciated by now that it strikes me how wide the crown of her head is, making me wonder: was she brought into the world with forceps sixty-five years ago?

She now walks to and fro round the house, all day long. She gets up off the sofa, goes to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the bathroom, from the bathroom back to the kitchen and from the kitchen to the hall and back again. I can count myself lucky that she no longer wants to go upstairs with a pair of shoes in her hands to put them away in a last paroxysm of domesticity in a wardrobe that has long since been dismantled.

The house smells of dust and emptiness upstairs — downstairs, all day long, the shuffling of soles across the floor and that human frame, clothes, skin and steel wire, from the front door to the back door, the arms lame alongside the body like a stray puppet in a clock mechanism.

Constantly sitting, crying, getting up, searching, sitting, crying and getting up again. No touch brings any rest; no song can calm her down. Only “Mum, for Christ’s sake sit down” helps — sometimes.

Gradually I begin to understand the euphemism lurking beneath the charming designation “home care”. Looking after sick family members yourself, with the support of district nurses — it sounds good.

Home care, as if we were still living in the late nineteenth century, when families averaged twelve hundred children apiece and there was an extensive network of cousins, aunts, uncles and relations more or less under one roof.

The district nurse is on sick leave, drained and burnt out and out of circulation for about three months. The home help who comes to clean has to recover every so often from her hectic daily round up hill and down dale to the umpteenth farm where an elderly farmer or farmer’s wife sits by the stove waiting for help.

In the paper I read that in England home care produces a saving for the NHS larger than the total education budget.

In our hospitals the vertebrae of nursing staff who twist their backs lifting the products of the ageing society are grinding.

Who wipes his arse with whom here?

Arise you workers from your slumbers, etc.

She said I can always ring her, the nurse, says my father. Even though she’s on sick leave.

You can call me, she said. Any time. Just you.

He needs to go into hospital for a minor procedure, nothing serious, but she has to be admitted too, there’s no alternative. The surgeon has arranged for a room for her in the secure geriatric unit.

I go with them. Two cases, one for him, one for her.

She is restless. She seems to realize that something is up, that she will be separated from my father, if only for about three nights.

She still always feels for my hand when I come to bed, he says.

Forms.

We must regard your mother’s stay as an ordinary admission. So we must fill out an admission form, says the duty neurologist.

Can your mother still wash by herself?

No, she can’t.

Eat and drink?

No, she can’t do that either.

Can your mother still get dressed and undressed?

I shake my head.

Is the home adapted for persons with a handicap?

They’ve been sleeping and living downstairs for months, I say. But I’m thinking: stop it, woman.

The next day we find her slumped in the chair by the window, with her chin against the edge of the table that has been clamped onto the arms of the chair. She is crying and frightened to death. Her hands are grabbing in all directions. Her soles are sliding across the floor as they’ve forgotten to lower the footrest. We help her up, and in the skin of her lower jaw is the blood-red imprint of the edge of the table.

She is silent and I am silent too. She with a head full of holes, I with a mouth full of plaster. Outside drizzle, the grey backs of buildings, wind in folded parasols. In the corridor the jolting of trolleys and the clatter of plates. At the nursing station a telephone bleeps. No one picks up. The nurse says: fortunately she ate well.

She goes from room to room, up and down the length of the corridor, the side corridor, the stairwell, as far as the glass door with the combination lock and the lift. She wants to go in everywhere, except into her own room. Then fear takes hold, she starts to cry and I can feel her muscles stiffening.

After the umpteenth attempt I lift her up and am hit in the process, put her in the chair by the window and clamp the table onto the armrests. Then I take her hand in mind and hum songs — for one, two hours. Children’s songs, folk songs, what I can still remember of the Gregorian repertoire.

She calms down. With her free hand she taps on the back of mine, then on the table top. She puts her thumb and forefinger together and seems to want to write something. Then she looks at me. Some more tears. We hum “Veni Creator Spiritus”.

When she calms down, sleep comes. One hand hangs in the air above the table top. Behind her glasses the eyelids fall shut, although they never seem to close completely. The eyelashes go on trembling, as if as soon as the eyes close the dreaming phase begins. The muscles in her neck relax, her head falls forward.

That’s how she sleeps, one hand hangs in the air for a while, and then sinks down next to the other. Sometimes her breathing becomes more regular, deeper, and a slow tidal movement ebbs and flows through her bones. Her sleeping skull rocks above the table — how thin she is.

For the fifth or sixth time she walks round the entire physiotherapy room with me, at the end of the corridor. Again she feels her way along the edge of the basket with the bunch of dried flowers, again she tries to pop the colourful pebbles in the bowl next to the bunch of dried flowers into her mouth and I extract them laboriously from between her smacking lips. And again, for the umpteenth time, she takes from a cabinet the little metal churn which, with all the rest of the kitsch, attempts in vain to brighten up the clinical area, and takes it to the kitchen corner and the draining board. Halfway she stops, uncertain, and then with the churn in her hand walks from one side of the room to the other, sobbing.