It’s been such a weekend, up again down again. I’m fairly sure my mother is on the way out, so is she and so is the senior carer but this morning she sounded bright and cheerful, though we both know that won’t last.
Saturday was dreadful. It was the hottest day of the year so far and my mother, on oxygen, felt every last degree of the heat, although her feet, as usual, were perishing cold.
It began, I think, with chilblains in the war. Certainly people who lived through it got used to being cold. Cold at bus stops, cold with no stockings just a gravy browning line up the back of your legs, cold in air raid shelters.
I certainly remember my mother in the 1950s, hopping in from the bus and sitting in the lounge with her feet in a bowl of water that she was topping up from a kettle. The water was hot, I recall her wincing. I believe that may have been when she started killing off the nerves in her feet. Whatever the cause of the initial deadness, it was compounded by the lack of circulation with her vascular problems. Then again she has never knowingly exercised but spent most of the last fifty years sitting with her feet up talking on the phone. The muscles that control her tongue are showing no signs of having atrophied at all, not even slightly, she could terrify a deafened docker at fifty paces, easily.
So she perceives her feet to be freezing although they are warm to the touch, which is hardly surprising as they spend most of the day in heated slippers under a blanket. This made her very gloomy on Saturday. In the morning initially she excused herself from the phone call. A kindly neighbour had taken her the Saturday paper. He has been doing this for at least eighteen months, now he goes in for a cup of tea and a little chat. I consider him not far off an angel in human shape. An old demented lady receiving a gentleman caller who is willing to ignore her peculiarities and chat over a cup of tea for a quarter of an hour once a week, is a happy demented old lady, who still feels like a woman. He is doing God’s work in my book.
By Saturday afternoon the heat had got to her and she was bitterly wishing herself dead and wanting to check arrangements and telling me how evil the carers were. On Sunday everything was wrong and according to the carer who rang me after her shift, things were progressing in a downward direction at speed.
I have to ring the Equity Release lenders each month to arrange the draw-down facility for the amounts I take from the value of my mother’s house. This morning there was no one there from the team first thing so, despite being given my phone number, when they did ring me, they had rung my mother first. No doubt I will suffer for this. My mother is actually sitting in a house with an entire corner missing, mortgaged to pay for her care. Last month the agency sent her a letter detailing the amount borrowed. She was incandescent. Last visit she said there were a couple of letters in a drawer. When I opened it I was engulfed and almost swept away by a molten avalanche of letters from the spewing Etna within, and, somewhere in the middle, the red hot mortgage document.
It has taken all weekend to work my way through several months worth of correspondence. Included, amazingly, a rebate from the tax man. Imagine that! The tax man being kind to a loopy old lady. Now she really has lived through everything.
I have also finished this morning the letters I must send when she dies. I thought I would do them here where there is a computer and a printer, rather than there where I will have to write them out by hand in triplicate, though actually I have printed four off of all of them. One to send, one to keep and two for the solicitor. This practical but macabre consideration began by me wondering idly how many death certificates I would need to send when my mother dies. 18 is the answer. Now I have them typed out and ready to go. My ducks are in as neat a row as I can manage so far and we can all get on with the business of living.
For a little while longer, at least.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
JaneLaverick.com – all paperwork.