Right off the bat, I'd just like to say thank you to every one of you, and there have been so many, who have asked about my mum in the past six-ish months (Six months? Fuck. Seriously?). I was blown away by the amount of messages I received then, and by all the people asking me about it to this day. It has meant, and continues to mean a whole bunch. Thank you.
If you have no idea what I'm nudging at with any of the above, here is the link to November's post about my mum. It's not a fun read, but worth it if you're going to understand today's update on the situation:
http://fooltide.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/mrs-doyle.html
No point drawing this out any longer than the month or so I've already held off on writing this, so here goes. Where were we?
"I don't know when she might be able to come home."
To put it bluntly, she didn't come home. Deirdre won't be coming home. As before, she's not dead. My dad has, shockingly, taken this quite hard. He has, on more occasions than I can count, mentioned the little absences. It's the weird things you miss. He's done a shoddy job of polishing the table in the sitting room, but there's nobody there to complain about it. It's an odd shaped hole in life, but it's there. Doesn't slow him down. Can't slow him down. Too much to do. He visited her every day, sometimes twice, in Tallaght Hospital.
"It's my wife, and I don't like to abandon her."
Nobody could accuse him of that. He didn't miss a day there, and I'm sure he won't miss a day in Peamount. As of just over a month ago, she has found a more stable bed in a specialist nursing facility there. The care in Tallaght was exemplary, as I trust it shall be in the new place. This is her home now. And she'll never be short of more or less daily visits from her Irish-based children either.
Christmas was fucking hard. Took a few weeks after that damn Wednesday in November for me to get back home. They didn't want me to see her that way; all manner of aggression, and paranoid confusion. She spent those weeks heavily sedated. I spent them drifting through my days in Scotland, with my mind already in Dublin. Still, Miriam kept me distracted as best she could. Then....er....things got worse.
Just under a couple of weeks after my mum was sectioned, Miriam's dad collapsed. I'm not sure what to say, and don't feel it's my place to do so here. I'm glad I met Robert, a genuinely warm-spirited man who just seems to have lived such a full and interesting life. I can only dream of experiencing even half as much. I'm glad I met him, and I'm sorry I didn't have the pleasure of getting to know him better. Everyone in that family has been so strong throughout those days, weeks, and the months that have followed. Orcadians, possibly inbred (I jest), but definitely tough.
From a personal perspective, it fucking sucked to have to decide to fly home to my mum's bedside at the potential expense of going to my girlfriend's dad's funeral....at Christmas. As it happened, I just managed both. Solemn a day as it was in Stirling, there was another wrinkle to it. Within an hour of the funeral, my dad called with the news I'd expected.
The working consensus is that mum had had a stroke in November. That was the catalyst for all that followed. Again, I can't go into too much detail here, but what went down that day is a cavalcade of things far worse than you'd imagine. Far worse than I could even, and I've been told.
One thing I know now is that I really want to thank my brother. What I have learned about the day my mum was taken away (even the part about her faking her death to escape a paramedic, which is hilarious), has led me to the conclusion that he's kind of a hero. So, thanks to you, Greg.
So, she likely had a stroke. And she wasn't going to recover. This was all she'd be. And so it is. Weird to take heart in the knowledge that it's not necessarily hereditary, but take heart I did. And then I returned to the iron-willed mourners in Stirling.
It's strange the things you miss. My mum used to say she never had any trouble with my brother, or my sister. Only with me. Her cheeky fucking son here was the bane of her parenting life it seemed. She often lamented the lack of effort I'd make in school. She knew I could do it with my eyes closed, so why couldn't I stop proving some point to myself and do it with my eyes fucking open for once?
When I first went to visit her in that ward in Tallaght, a nurse asked me if I was "David". Technically, but I'm not about to try to get my mum's head round calling me "Deebs" now, so I went with it.
"She's been calling for you the last few nights. Says you're not doing any work for your exams. Apparently you're nothing but trouble."
Shit, total honest truth time. That made me smile from ear to god damn ear. That, and the two or three times she's got pissed at the vague notion of me in her presence since, was one of the good moments. Of all the things that make you remember a person so fondly, it's weird for it to be her entirely warranted lecturing of me. The fact though, and I'm sorry if this hurts or offends any single member of my family who may read this, is that that isn't my mother. She's Sam Beckett, Quantum Leaping through time in her own life. And oh boy, she ain't got no Al or Ziggy.
She's not present. We get glimpses of her. That's it. We only see echoes of the woman she used to be. She's not there anymore. She's not in that bed-bound woman. It's sad, but it's true to me. No, I don't see the point of buying her a Mother's Day card. She never liked Mother's Day anyway. Most of her "conversations" are non-sequiturs spoken to the wall beside her bed, possibly from the midway point of a real or imagined conversation that took place four or five decades ago. We get the echoes though. Apparently, her son David looks like the me sitting beside her bed. His hair's all fallen out, and it's worse he's getting.
I exist in a book beside her bed. A book that plots out some broad brush strokes of her life. Her and my dad had started writing it in the weeks or months before this all came to a head. They didn't get it finished in time, but it's there, and I have my mostly accurate paragraph of life. It's so that her carers can decipher the former Deirdre Mary Miriam Doyle. I never knew her middle name was Miriam. There's too much I didn't know about her. Too much I never will. How the fuck did she make those cakes!?
I attached a photo of her as a nurse in November's post. My dad had no idea where it came from, how I found it, or where he could find it again. My mum hated photos of her. She told me once that she didn't see the point. Hell, if you're experiencing something, just experience it. Don't waste a memory trying to capture it, instead of living the fucking thing. Fair point to a largely agreeable extent. Yet, where are the pictures now? Where are the memories? I am often accused of being a poser, or a camera whore. Man, I really hate having my picture taken, but I do love that there are pictures out there. I would have loathed to have pictures taken of me wearing the head-brace I sported for some six months in my youth, but I wish I had some now. And I wish, for far different reasons, that the only way to sneak that picture from a shoebox buried in the back of my parent's wardrobe wasn't to surreptitiously photograph it on my crappy camera phone several years ago. And I wish this wasn't the only picture of most of the family together. Sorry bro.
The day I came home with a blue fauxhawk, less than a week before my college graduation, I walked up behind my mum and asked what she thought. She spun around and:
"FUCK!"
She covered her face with her hands and recoiled. I'd Elephant Manned her. Swearing was seldom her style, save for the occasional "gobshite" thrown my way. A few seconds later, she'd summoned enough calm and composure to look at me again.
"I mean....no....fuck!"
She got used to it. She even liked it in time. It was often her way to openly question how the fucking fuck she had birthed such a child. She usually said I was "odd" with just enough delicate intonation to let me know that it at least kept me interesting. Man, she did not get my hats. Or the horrendous shirts.
I came home to see her in March, and stayed long enough to fit in a film festival to keep me distracted. I landed with striped flares in Dublin, to be greeted by my bemusedly smirking dad and niece.
"Why are you wearing pyjamas?"
I heard that exact same bloody "joke" from my brother, sister, brother-in-law, other niece, and my nephew at various points within the next day. My sister-in-law likely would have gotten in on the act too if it hadn't been said in front of her on three separate occasions. When I walked into the ward to see my mum the next afternoon, she said aloud and to nobody in particular:
"That's a lovely dressing gown."
So close. Only echoes.
Still, as I set my top hat to a suitably jaunty angle before heading out for the closing night of that film festival, I couldn't help but chuckle to myself.
She would have fucking hated those shoes.
(Sorry about all the fucking swearing, dad....again)
