I had to persuade Dad that it has gradually become necessary to provide permanent residential care for my mother. He is aware of that, but finds it difficult to take in. He considers it betrayal, he feels guilty. So it was a cautious conversation. I with all my antennae alert steering a course round many cliffs so as not to offend him. He nodding, saying nothing, sobbing. But the conclusion was that shortly I shall be going to the nursing home with one of my sisters and putting Mum on the waiting list. So in a few months, given her condition, she will be leaving the house for good.
After the first shock he realizes that it is not the best but the least bad solution, and so do I. Nevertheless I am racked with guilt. I am pushing my mother out of the house, because there’s no alternative. My father is crying with misery. Oh, I say nothing, I look out of the window at how beautifully blue the evening is. The white poplar waves a thousand grey-green crib sheets at once.
There has been so much death in the last few years. Every few months or so standing at the deathbed of someone close numbs the heart. I should get the ash washed out of my pores. I should like once again to be the creature with the thousand vibrating cilia that shimmers with a rapture approaching despair at each leaf that falls from a branch, each fall of light or the ecstatic proximity of a still-unknown body with the bronze boom of all the intertwined histories, all the fears and longings it harbours, and which I want to read like braille, until the ink splashes onto the page out of sheer abundance. Without it writing is harder.
Stupidity, selfishness and health, that’s what you need to be happy. But if the first is lacking, all is lost (Flaubert).
Day in, day out she walks round the house. She doesn’t sit still for more than ten minutes at a time. She opens drawers she has left untouched for months or years, and looks and looks. I find her in the kitchen trying to spoon gravy from a pan, while holding a glass under the tap. It is as if her body is making a last effort to keep a grip on things.
She strolls through my study, for half an hour she walks from the living room to the hall to the dining room with my dictionary in her hands. Then she puts it on the window sill, trying to place it exactly parallel with the edge, and leaves it there.
I had imagined their old age differently. In twenty years or so they would be old, the roles would be reversed and it’d be us who looked after them. But their old age is suddenly on the doorstep, and won’t go away. I smell it in their clothes, they no longer bother to change their underwear every day, I fear — a helper will have to come in. How would he be able to cope otherwise? She traipses round after him all day long. Even on the toilet he is scarcely alone. She clings to him. Everywhere and at every moment that one word she has left, Dad, rings out — ever more hoarsely.
Is this life then? I wonder aloud at breakfast. Yes, this is life, says Lieven. And we haven’t seen the end of it yet.
In the intervals between writing — I work from the morning until about four in the afternoon — I am gradually preparing for another farewelclass="underline" from my grandmother, my mother’s mother. Her shoulder is not healing, after that fall she had a few months back. Increasingly she develops a high temperature, has problems with all kinds of infections and, mainly, mentally she has virtually “gone”. She seems to have no sense of place or time, and when I last saw her she called me “Jozef”, the name of her brother who was killed in the war. She said nothing else, apart from the the mumbled rosaries she prays every waking hour. It would surprise me if she makes it to Easter.
If she dies, I shall have to support my father for a few days, as my mother won’t be much help to him. She herself, to my relief, reacts calmly to developments. It will be a release, she said to me — strikingly lucidly and without faltering.
She died on Thursday morning at about ten o’clock, the grandmother. While I was on the train home the Monday before, I had a call from my father, who told me that she was failing fast. My sisters, my brothers and I stood watch by her bedside. I’m glad she remembered me, although she was too weak to talk — she spoke with her eyes and squeezed my hand.
The calm and serenity with which she awaited the end of her life are moving and in an odd way also consoling. The days I spent alternately working on the novel and with her, and while I was writing in the garden I felt strangely “embedded” in existence.
My mother is very upset, which for us in itself, strangely enough, is reassuring; although there are days when a real conversation is no longer possible, she is more “intact” than we might sometimes think.
The funeral, after six days of not really profound grief, was more full of poignant melancholy — one can hardly call eighty-nine a case of cot death. Only after the service, in the cemetery, when the coffin lay there so alone, sunk in the grave, in the pouring rain, did I break down for a moment.
Now she rests beside my grandfather, which is a consolation, near the avenue to the château. A very beautiful part of the village where I grew up — one of the landscapes that are very dear to Lieven and me.
After the funeral meal we toured the area a bit, the woods of Alter, and the old arable lands around the Bruges canal. The rain had washed away all the dust from the previous warm days, a bluish mist hung over the countryside and everything looked so green. Ancestral ground too, because at the foot of the embankment of the canal there is still the farm where my grandmother was born. After lying empty for years the house and the animal quarters are now being restored. It did me good to see it all again. In the last few years I have gone home frequently, but almost exclusively to provide sick-care, without taking much time for long walks or thinking things over.
Now we are left with boxes and cases and the always-too-scanty messages on posthumous paper.
It comes so easily to us, speaking and writing. One word brings the next with it, one silence splits like a shell around the next. If I am in the kitchen chopping vegetables, I think of her garbled language and wonder: what must it be like in that head of yours? Do all those cells sometimes accidentally intermesh again, and is self-consciousness suddenly created? Who am I and who are you? What do I still mean to you, and who are you to me? I can no longer remember when you were still well. That’s why I hack away so recklessly at that leek.
At table, as she is drinking a glass of lemonade, it goes down the wrong way and she coughs.
I hear the timbre of her voice in her coughing.
I recognize her.
It gave me a fright, says Lieven afterwards. I suddenly heard Nelly again.
She hasn’t said anything for months.
When we told him, when we had to tell him that his wife had Alzheimer’s, he said: I want to look after her myself for as long as possible.
We’ll sort that out, we said. And we also said it was better if she herself didn’t know. Unless she gave very clear signs of an awareness that something was wrong with her.
Our doctor said: in my experience it’s better not to give relatively young Alzheimer patients the diagnosis. It’s highly likely they will develop a serious depression on top of their dementia. It’s better if she can enjoy the lucid years she has left.
We shall have to face it, we said, and together try to make the best of it.
He was silent.
Later I rang him.