Day 3,336 in the Nanny June Care Home

The One With What We Have Left Now

So care homes can allow visitors once more. This would be amazing apart from the one barrier that keeps us apart. A massive floor to ceiling, wall to wall glass screen which is there to keep us safe. It has a nasty glare which is tough on failing eyesight. It needs headsets to hear each other which are difficult from a sensory point of view. It allows touching through apertures for fixed rubber gloves that are thick enough to navigate a nuclear detonation.

The greatest barrier however is that we have had no physical contact for over a year.

Nanny June's failing memory cells volley around her increasingly vacant brain like tiny particles in the Hadron Collider, accelerating around in a vast space until they hit something significant. Except that they very rarely do.

During a visit or on the phone, all Nanny June sees in me now is (at best) an over familiar stranger passing the time of day or a cold caller trying to sell something or scam her. Any contact with her from me is for her now an inconvenience. Her social conditioning still remains in place so she is polite but wants to get rid of me. I mean as much as a double glazing salesman on her doorstep asking to give her a quote while I am in the area.

Back in the summer when we could meet outside (but still not touch) it was taking a great deal of social perseverance on both our parts until the slow moving cogs of her mind caught up with the visual prompts from her eyes and she could recognise me.

When the fine weather returns and we can spend time together outside again I wonder if we will be able to recover any lost ground or if it is now indeed gone and I will be classed a random person forever more.

I always made a conscious effort to visit the care home as often as possible, in a desperate attempt to not lose the connection between us - which has over the last ten years moved from the metal rope it once was, to the spiderweb gossamer strands it is now. I know I lurk in her mind somewhere, my birth is archived and filed under Significant Emotional Moments. My childhood has gone. My adulthood certainly lost. My identity all but erased. Other people remain, her parents and her siblings are still there. Her childhood memories too.

Which makes me wonder about the experience I give my own children. If this is what remains in a worst case scenario when they get old - what would they remember of me, of their own childhood. What would I remember of mine?

We are all on a journey. Importantly, this makes me realise we are all part of someone else's journey too. All lives must end and we cannot carry every person with us to our last breath. We lose touch with some people. Some people move on without us. Circumstance takes some people. Time takes others. Sickness and fatality some others. I can see though that we remain as constant echoes, our lives especially intertwined with friends and forever connected in memories and dreams. Those many moments we were held by someone who loved us until it wore a memory into our subconscious like water on a stone.

When my dad died, it was just him and me alone in a room. He had dementia and in his final days he just really wanted his mum. It felt so important to me that he left this world on a wave of love. The last words he heard were affirmations of strength and courage and a life well lived.

In dementia, in death, in distance - we can never truly be removed from someone. Our brains are more complicated than that. Life is more complicated than that. Connections are more complicated that that. Love is more complicated than that. If you are reading this (thank you) - you have opportunities each day to build a tower of memories for someone else, weave into the fabric of another life or contribute something beautiful to the world which a stranger can remember forever.

If you feel life is not full enough of variety or adventure, don't underestimate the wonderfulness of repetitions and routine... when worlds crumble, these can become pillars of familiarity that others and yourself can use to place yourself. And knowing ourself is an underrated strength. Knowing ourself when all around us becomes messy, means we can still contribute to the worlds of the people around us with intentionality and bring something to their life that no one else ever can and could maybe even stay with them until their last breath.