Weeks in Naviras by Chris Wimpress

Author:Chris Wimpress [Wimpress, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2014-01-14T08:00:00+00:00

Padlock

One person arrived in my life as two others left it, all in fairly quick succession. My father went first; although he didn’t die, he simply ceased to exist. His doctor explained it to me gently; it had a name, some syndrome named after the clinician who’d first categorised it. Alcohol-induced dementia was the easiest way of describing it.

‘Your father’s liver and other organs are functioning reasonably well,’ said the doctor, looking directly at me as she explained how there’d been an alarming rise in such cases over the years. ‘Quite remarkable, given his drinking history. But I’m afraid the degeneration can’t be stopped now, even if he abstains from drinking. It’s irreversible, unfortunately.’

‘What’s the prognosis?’ I was feeling nauseous, but that’s probably because I was nearly four months pregnant with Sadie. Bobby had given me almost no morning sickness and I hadn’t been prepared for it.

‘He could live for another twenty years.’ The doctor was gentle, you could tell she’d had many similar conversations. ‘But more often than not there’re complications before that, owing to the lack of mobility.’ She warned me that mania and delusions were likely. ‘You have to prepare for the possibility that your father will become someone you don’t know any more. It’s the hardest part for relatives but it’s best to be forewarned, I think.’

I told people it was early-onset dementia; much easier to sum up in a sentence, everyone understood and offered their sympathy. We had to move him to a nursing home in Eppingham, where he was the youngest resident by a good ten years. For a while I tried to juggle seeing him with work, the kids, everything else. I was run ragged and began to question the point of seeing Dad at all. He’d spend all day in his room at the nursing home, not speaking to anyone. Even though he was only seventy he quickly became the most demented resident, often when I’d visit him he wouldn’t even acknowledge me. James quickly stopped accompanying me, saying it was pointless.

‘She lives here, you know,’ Dad told me once, during a brief moment of clarity. ‘Your mother, she’s just in the next room. She comes to see me every night.’

He didn’t notice me sobbing; perhaps he thought I was laughing because he looked at me suspiciously. The nurses told me Dad would often mistake one of them for Mum, would get angry with them for leaving him at night. ‘He’s just very confused,’ they’d say. Him and me both, I thought.

He should’ve been frightened at the state he’d managed to get himself into, but instead was just oblivious. It was me who was frightened, and exhausted. How many years would he linger in this mental twilight? How often should I go to see him? It concerned James, too. ‘You’ve got to make sure you visit him at least twice a week,’ he said one Sunday night. ‘I’m worried if we just leave him to rot in there, the nurses’ll tell the papers and it’ll look bad on me.

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