Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 15, 2014

Something about her was different. She looked smaller than I remembered. The hunch of her shoulders had become more pronounced. Gone was her trademark copper rinse, her hair now blowsy and grey. “Auntie G!” I called, spotting her several trolley lengths away in Coles. She was holding open a freezer door, studying a shelf of frozen peas, but didn’t react. I parallel parked my trolley and leaned over. “Auntie G!” I repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

She jerked around and stared at me. “It’s Rosi,” I said, sensing her confusion. Perhaps I’d frightened her? She gave me a wan smile but no glimmer of recognition. I began to feel uncomfortable. What should I do next?

“Do you need a hand?”

“I can’t find the icecream.”

“Oh, that’s on the other side. I can never find it either.” She brightened and nodded when I said “I’ll show you where it is, shall I?”

Cupping her elbow, I gently steered her round the corner, stopping beside the icecream cabinet. She looked relieved.

I’d always had a soft spot for Auntie G because she’d produced my favourite girl cousin, Elizabeth, who was 36 days younger than me.

Sleeping over at Lizzie’s house, I found the noise of her riotous family overwhelming. As an only child, I was secretly thrilled (and occasionally terrified) to witness Auntie G berating her disobedient tribe.

Their house had a backyard swimming pool, a glamorous addition to any 1970s childhood. On a summer afternoon, we kids played Marco Polo and Pool Ponies and practiced our underwater handstands until our fingertips puckered and the soles of our feet pruned. Auntie G leant over the balcony and dropped down a couple of fraying towels. We lay on them, tummies down, dry-roasting on the hot bricks. She’d send out a plate of her coconut macaroons, left over from a dinner party the night before.

Now, aged 78, my Aunty G has dementia. She’s newly diagnosed and still in denial. Her family struggles to manage her decline. She defends her memory lapses with angry outbursts, slipping into the personality of someone else. But Auntie G is not yet in need of care. The good days still outnumber the bad.

Two years ago, I came across Auntie G in the centre of a busy road in West Leederville. She’d abandoned her cream Camry in the middle of an intersection and was standing aimlessly beside it. Drivers were dog-legging around her, windows wound down to sticky-beak at this surburban oddity. I pulled over and got out of my car.

“Oh! Thank goodness you found me!” she said anxiously. “I can’t seem to find Lizzie’s house.”

“You can see it from here,” I said, pointing back down the hill. I wondered how my aunt could have driven past it.

She thanked me and climbed back into her car, swung it around and coasted down the hill. I watched her park outside her daughter’s house. I drove home feeling alarmed.

It was not my first glimpse into mental frailty. My uncle Don, Mum’s only sibling, succumbed to dementia after a career as a concert pianist, academic and mathematician.

The tragedy of his retirement was the swift unravelling of his mind. First he lost the ability to pick left from right, distinguish between cup and kettle and recognise a dollar coin in his wallet. Then it erased his encyclopaedic memory of Schubert sonatas and Brahms concertos until he could no longer play two- finger Chopsticks or sing along to Three Blind Mice.

To watch him, at 76, regress to a childlike state was frightening, but there were lovely moments. His disease bonded him to my two youngest children. He never tired of their knock-knock jokes, cackling at their made-up punchlines. He gleefully joined in their games of hide and seek, bolting for the same empty wardrobe every time. Like them, he startled at loud noises and needed help cutting up his dinner.

The end came quickly and cruelly, four months after a traumatic move into a nursing home.

On occasion, I contemplate my own future. What if my genes, too, are predisposed to intellectual decay? I remind myself it’s normal to be constantly searching for your specs. As I stand in the laundry (what was it I came in here for?) I feel uneasy. Is this how it starts? The foggy brain? Conversations that falter as I try to force an elusive word to crystallise in my mind. The embarrassing pause as I yet again forget the new soccer coach’s name.

Last Monday, as I dashed around the supermarket, I spotted Auntie G again. She was filling a paper bag with potatoes. She waved at me across the fruit crates. “The mangos look nice!” she called. I bought two on her say-so.

The story of life

The story of life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 7, 2013

It was his email that intrigued me:

‘You have no clue what really happens when you get old. My wife of 55 years has been taken from me by illness. Maybe one day you could visit her in the nursing home. She is in room 19. Her name is Ada.’

Warm regards, Carl, 87.

The following day, on a whim, I drive out to the aged care home. It’s a secure facility. A cleaner notices me waiting expectantly on the visitor’s side of the door. She punches in the security code, then pads noiselessly away on her soft soles, leaving me to guess which of the deserted corridors to search first. I inhale that haunting scent – the staleness of life at its lowest ebb. It’s the same miasma I recall from the nursing home where my Nan died – the smell of confinement, unease and antiseptic.

I knock gently on the door of Room 19 and hear a chair scrape as someone gets up to open the door. “I told her you’d come!” Carl beams at me. “Come and meet my beauty.”

He still has his veteran’s pride: khaki trousers with a sharp crease up the thigh, a pressed short-sleeved shirt, shiny chestnut brogues. Only his hearing aid and the Velcro bandage gripping his wrist hint at any outward signs of decline.

His wife, Ada, is slumped awkwardly in the bed, a slip of a woman in a voluminous cream nightie dotted with cornflowers. Her spindly arms and papery skin stand out in relief against the fat, dimpled pillows stacked behind her. She’s breathing noisily, her lids drooped over cloudy eyes. Carl smooths a wayward wisp of her fairy floss hair.

“She’s not coming back to me is she?” We both know the answer. “Two of her brothers had Parkinsons” he continues, “and now she’s started with the tremors. I give her a kiss and she gives me ten in return!” We both smile.

A nurse rattles in with lunch and briskly suggests we wait outside. “Ada’s refusing to eat,” Carl explains, and leads me to two plastic chairs in the corridor.

He is surprisingly buoyant. “This is my world now. Sitting with her hour after hour, then going home to a cold bed. I want you to write what it’s like to grow old: always looking back at life over your shoulder.”

He points to an elderly gent leaning precariously forward in his wheelchair. “That’s Ray,” Carl says. The wheelchair’s foot rests are folded up and out of the way and Ray is using his slippered feet to inch along the carpet. “The week after he moved here to be with his wife, she passed away. He doesn’t realise she’s gone. He spends his whole day shuffling from room to room looking for her.” Ray looks searchingly at me as he edges his wheelchair past us: “Do you know where they’ve taken her?” I am moved to tears.

Carl stares at the burgundy leaf-pattern in the carpet while I collect myself. “I met Ada on the bus, you know,” he says. “I came to Fremantle after the war. I was a frontline interpreter. I’m Dutch, but I speak four languages so the Yanks wanted me.”

He opens his wallet and pulls out a small plastic sleeve. He tips a pebble into my hand. “Grenade” he tells me. “They took this shrapnel out of me leg. I howled like a baby. Ada always told me I was a big sook.”

“She tricked me into marrying her, you know,” he says. “I’m Catholic. My family back home didn’t want no Church of England girl. She says to me one day: Can you take me to Hehir street?”

“I know that street” I says to her. “Little church there.”

“We arrive at the church and the priest says to me: Know what you’re here for?”

“Ada had gone and got herself converted. We got married three weeks later.” He leans into me and says: “You girls got your ways of getting your man!”

We’re allowed back into Ada’s room. “She still won’t eat” the nurse tells Carl, as she pushes the lunch trolley out the door. He lifts Ada’s limp arm and nestles it in his. The veins at her wrist are ropey and tinged with green. The lingering remains of a soft-pink manicure stain her nails.

Carl reaches over to the bedside table and picks up a hand mirror with a long gilt handle. He holds it so Ada can see her reflection: “Look at those rosy cheeks!” he coos, but Ada doesn’t register.

“I just want my wife back,” he says. I see a tear slide down his cheek.

He leans in and plants a kiss on Ada’s slackened mouth. We sit in silence by her bedside. Ada shifts in the bed, swallows uncomfortably. Her eyes focus, settling on her husband. Her voice is trembly with the effort of speech but there’s no mistaking what she whispers: “I see a beautiful face.” And then she turns her head away and stares unblinkingly at the door.

Ada Caubo – 24/3/1928 – 13/11/13