'Dad has had more comebacks than Elvis': confessions of a reluctant carer

People react kindly when I tell them I look after my folks, but things are not as selfless as they seem. I care, but I am also captive. When I first came home, temporarily I imagined, to help them through a difficult patch, I had a house, a marriage and some semblance of a career. That was more than 12 months ago. Then the work project that had absorbed the previous two years and all my money came to nothing, my relationship collapsed, and there was a further decline in my parents’ health. Which is more or less how I found myself back in a room and a town I left in the late 80s, caring for people in their late 80s. My siblings work and I am the best person for the job, in part since I have nowhere else to go.

Except sometimes out for lunch.

On one such day, Dad, 87, feels like leaving the house. This should be a cause for celebration. It’s been weeks. Whether he should be behind the wheel remains a conversation for another day.

My mother, 89, is fitter and more gregarious than my father and for her to be laid up is the exception. Shingles is keeping her inside. A visit from the cleaner means she won’t be alone, but I nevertheless glance up at her window as we leave. Dad catches his breath in whatever is left of his lungs and swings the motor around. I think about learning to drive; I’ve been meaning to do it for 30 years. I had been meaning to do a lot of things. Pushing 50 and moving back in with my parents wasn’t among them.

On the road, Dad is transformed. I’m happy to see him doing something well and enjoying it. It can take him breathless minutes just to open a letter. As we leave town I alternate between memories of childhood drives and panic over what I should do if he were to fall ill at the wheel.

Dad parks directly outside the front door of the pub. His disabled badge allows him this and, despite any number of available disabled spaces nearby, this is now what he does wherever he goes. The blue badge bandit: he’s here and he’s hungry and he’s blocking your door.

The owner seats us by a roaring fire. Dad seems pleased. Since midsummer, my parents have never quite been warm enough. This would probably still be the case if they moved to a smaller, more modern house at the heart of the sun. He devours a plate of scallops, tells me he doesn’t feel so good, then, as though struck by a bullet, he collapses.

I get behind him and support him in a way that feels therapeutic but more closely resembles a full nelson. I signal to the owner to call an ambulance, ignore the stares of our fellow diners and ask plaintively in the old man’s ear if he’s all right, if he can hear me. Nothing.

I consider that if he has snuffed it, then this is not a bad way to go. Scallops, driving, pubs and fires. For what had threatened to be a long and perhaps undignified decline to have halted abruptly is no tragedy.

A paramedic arrives and we place my father across three chairs, like an extra in a stage illusion in which the seats will be removed, and leave him suspended. Instead, an earthlier miracle: with his feet higher than his heart, my father revives.

“Old people by the fire,” says the paramedic. “Blood pressure plummets, they faint.”

Dad pukes so loudly the whole restaurant comes to a standstill.

“Not uncommon,” assures the paramedic.

“What shall I do with your lunch?” asks the pub landlord. I tell him I’ll eat mine. Death is inevitable, yet it remains a sin to waste food.

The paramedic asks how we’ll be getting home. “I guess he shouldn’t be driving?” The paramedic shakes his head. Cab then. Cabs from now on, maybe. If we ever go out again.

Back at home, our mostly demure and deferential household has been remixed by old age into a free-fire zone of profanity, fluids and flatulence. For years the most you would have heard here was a yawn. Now everything spoken is yelled, and the body’s once repressed and managed language has become the rasping, retching lingua franca. I have witnessed symphonies of farts that have lasted longer than many of our conversations, and simple conversations conducted at operatic volume, then repeated until there can be no doubt that it is Monday, or Tuesday, that yes Mum has her hearing aids in, or whatever else has been misheard or mis-said.

“Your parents fight,” one of the neighbours says to me, sadly. No, I explain, that’s just them talking. Or maybe just one of them on the phone.

The centre of this sonic confusion is the kitchen. Nutrition, medication, laundry – it all happens here. Adjoining it is a small bathroom, which adds to the fun. Although separated by double doors, my father is insistent on leaving these open (driven, according to my sister, by a fear of dying on the toilet like Elvis). This means that, to all intents and purposes, and certainly in terms of sound, the toilet is in the kitchen, too.

I have a lot of time for that small downstairs bathroom. As a teenager, it was there that I first confronted my reflection having lost my virginity. And it was there, not long afterwards, that I watched the nascent stubble on my face appear to wave and ripple as I struggled with my first hit of LSD.

The tiny mirror that bore witness to these adolescent milestones is also a favourite of my father’s. He likes to bring it with him when he goes to hospital, so he can inspect the latest indignities that time has inflicted on his scalp and face. “Why does he need it?” Mum will hiss on finding it gone again. I have tried giving him a different mirror, but he pines for the original.

The mirror business, like so many other seemingly innocuous things that, in a younger household might submit to logic, will run and run. I have found it useful, when considering if and how to intervene in the everyday contretemps that permeate my parents’ 60-year marriage, to remember that one day, soon, there will be nothing to argue about and no one to argue with.

Meanwhile, the downstairs bathroom throws back vengeful echoes of my youthful escapades. On a good day, this means nothing more than Dad paying one of his catheter-emptying visits every hour or so. On less fortunate occasions, incontinence strikes and the scenes then are somewhere on the margins of agriculture, protest and performance art.

It is a very small space in which to operate, particularly when one must work around the victim of the latest indignity. Over time we have discovered that best practice is for the sufferer to remain where they are until the first stages of clean up are done. As I snap on another pair of nitrile gloves (and if there is a single invention that makes all these things bearable, it is a box of nitrile gloves) I reflect that there is something to be said for a family that has entered a post-embarrassment culture. In the room of furtive reflections, we finally have nothing to hide.

Downtime becomes so scarce that sometimes, between errands, I just stand still. I am doing this in the hall, a liminal space between the possible future of the dining room (where I gaze at the internet) and the presenting past of my bedroom (where I sift through drawers of adolescent tat) when my father calls me into his lair, the living room (as hot as Saudi Arabia, but with stricter rules about what’s on television).

“Jeff Bezos,” announces Dad admiringly, “richest man in the world!” He leans forward from the chair in which he will spend the rest of the day and perhaps his life and offers me the paper. I refuse it, saying “I know” and immediately dislike myself for doing so.

Dad seems hurt that I don’t want to read about Bezos and his money, but it’s because I am beginning to get a sense of just how much of Bezos’s money was once my father’s.

Though he loves an entrepreneur, my father hails from a vanished land of unionised labour and pensions. The same pension that keeps the house at the approximate temperature of the palm house at Kew all year round ensures a steady stream of Bezos’ foot soldiers to our door.

From the absurd: a single bottle of lemonade (Me: “I go to the shops!” Him: “I was thirsty.”); to the absurdly wrapped: a walking stick packaged like a running machine; to the poignant succession of balms, salves and medical ephemera, the deliveries form a steady, cardboard tide.

Despite a flurry of Amazon-related gags – “All this comes from South America?” – Mum has relapsed into mostly quiet annoyance as my father stirs the world to pointless action from his chair. Having shopped for us all, and then just him till she was no longer able, her awareness of the cause and effect chain behind bringing something to the table is keener than his will ever be. That he has in his dotage secured a mastery of technology that effectively cuts her out of the loop forms but another strand in the bonds and resentments that sustain them.

Though I am my mother’s natural ally, I get where the old man is coming from. As he stabs at his screen, I wonder how much he and men of a similar age and circumstance, the tail enders of 20th-century masculinity, have contributed to Bezos’s billions? Shorn of your faculties, it must be something to have the power to summon protein and so much more.

My father’s gout worsens, swelling his already swollen feet until no slipper can fit. Amazon, naturally, is the preferred solution. And so, to the existing flow, there comes a rush of couriers, bringing slippers of increasing width to test against his feet. None of which fit, and so there is an ebbtide of returns, until the pantomime “Gouterella” concludes with the arrival of a Velcro-flapped pair broad enough to set sail in.

The joy is short-lived as, days later, an abscess on one of his toes explodes.

You think you have conquered certain fears, but life has a way of finding us out. I felt I could clean up anything, but what emerges and keeps emerging from the burst and gouty “tophus” takes me to the limits of repulsion. Dad refuses to go to hospital. The abscess, mine to drain and dress in the meantime, refuses to respond to antibiotics.

The stalemate (and things are much more stale than matey at this point) is broken when a district nurse arrives and somehow whispers my father into hospital. As she does paperwork at the kitchen table, while ignoring calls from her supervisor to get on to the next job, she asks me how I am. The entire construct of my coping collapses and I find myself fighting back tears. She nods, as though my inner fiction was as obvious and unsustainable as the foul state of my father’s toe.

Dad, though, is resolutely of the “once you go in, you’ll never come out” school of thought. I point out he has been in and made it home four times this year. He has had more comebacks than Elvis, even if he doesn’t want to die like him.

In his absence, the Amazon deliveries keep coming, fewer each day. Then one day, nothing. I balance them into a pile, a cairn of crap upon his chair. I prise open the window in the living room and breathe in the cold. For the respite of every hospital admission, there is (one hopes, mostly) a discharge. But then we must adapt and learn our world all over again. When it’s hard just to keep things stable, even progress can feel like a kick in the teeth. Mum makes it downstairs and asks me what will happen next. It has been a long time since I could answer that question. All we can say is, something will.

The author blogs at reluctantcarer.com

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