Yesterday I had to put my mum in a care home.
Janet Berry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the spring of 2004 and moved to a new home near where I life with my wife in September of that year. I gave up my job in 2005 to look after her and took her for her last holiday to Walt Disney World that autumn. Late last year she began to show signs of severe deterioration, getting lost outside her home (and also, later, in it), and losing the ability to care for, or toilet, herself properly. She had visiting carers - originally just once or twice a day - who would come to make sure she was washed and dressed, and that she went to bed at night.
In recent months, she started to hallucinate that people (usually on the television) were trying to break into the house and kill her. She spent a lot of time frightened, recoiling in horror, crying or trying to express panic. She struggled to string together more than a couple of words of sense.
Now she lives in a room in a residential home alongside other people with dementia. At the moment, she still knows my name and treats me as her only friend. Every time she sees me, she tells me how much she loves me. She continually asks where I am. I am told this will pass. I didn't even tell her she was being moved. We just left her house and walked to the home together, down the high street, with a suitcase of her clothes. She skipped once or twice like a little girl. She likes being out in the sunshine.
This photo is of Janet when she first went on holiday with my dad, Peter, probably in 1970. She doesn't recognise him in photos any more - I don't know whether this is cruel or otherwise.
But at least this way I can tell everyone, and I don't actually have to talk about it.
