The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches from the Edge of Life

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Dad, born in 1930, left school at 14 and held a unionised, well-pensioned job for four decades. He retired at 60. By 90, he was unable to hold a pen, sign a form or rise from his chair unassisted. It fell to me to wrangle the family finances, and I have the revulsion for mathematics and practicality that only a child of someone sensible and well-paid can afford.

Her present live-in carer hails from Africa but even she says it is worse than being close to the equator. And she has a point. Sitting down and trying to talk with mum in there is like getting a workplace review from Satan. Although they do say the devil knows your name, whereas mum sometimes does not, so perhaps I am being unfair. Liam Appleby, in Tyne and Wear, says, ‘It was funny in places, moving in others and captured the full emotions throughout the journey of caring for someone. Truly a great book.’ I listened to a lot of prognoses and treatment plans, but no one ever seemed to touch on the big question – how long has he got? The senior nurse would have a kind of giggling fit if I really pressed him for some sense of how things might pan out. In the end they would refer you to a doctor who was never around. This person, they said, would have the answers. But this person is not here to tell you them.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.

Picador has pre-empted non-fiction book The Reluctant Carer by an anonymous author whose recent article went viral. 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. Whenever I come into my parents’ house, I am aiming for maximum openness, beginner’s mind ( Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice by Shunryu Suzuki | Goodreads). But I am also a son visiting my mother, so that drama is playing out too. You can’t meditate out of that one and stay useful. I’ve tried.So they employ a live-in carer, Mandy, to look after their father. Mandy is “not beautiful – far from it. An overweight woman in Rosemary West specs, wearing a bobble hat and stripy tights, something vaguely blokey about her.” And yet within weeks she has inveigled her way into their father’s affections: calling him pet names, escorting him on outings he would have previously sneered at and taking an apparently unhealthy interest in his personal paperwork. Forty moves from bed to breakfast table, just one of the many adventures of a Reluctant Carer. Image by Maarten van der Heuvel on Unsplash. Once I connected the music to the movie it began to make sense. My dad, who had left school aged 14, loved Shakespeare. And this infection became a part of me, by accident or design or osmosis and his determined dream that I should have more time in education than he. Either way, those words, centuries old, would become part of our connection. More, somehow and sometimes, than the everyday ones we used to say. That As You Like It speech ends, “ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” But what Shakespeare has missed (his parents died at 70 and 71) is the gift of coming to things sans assumptions. Knowledge can be power, for sure, but wisdom sometimes lies in letting it go. Perhaps my father was quiet, or perhaps I talked too much to really listen. Either way, I learned a lot about us both while studying his paperwork, sitting in the bedroom he could no longer get to as downstairs he watched old Westerns on a booming television. Over the four years I cared for him – alongside a cohort of professionals, my siblings and, when she wasn’t too frail herself, my mother – I came to understand that I wasn’t just nursing a man towards oblivion, but a socio-economic system. This was a palliative farewell to an entire way of life.

Even now, months from that recognition, I need to sit down when I hear it. If there is no one about then, I will cry. It might be the same if someone were about, it just hasn’t happened yet and I wouldn’t want it to. This is as intimate as I can let it get, for now. 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. Incredible. One of those rare books that should be dispensed on prescription to every household.' - Lucy Easthope, author of When the Dust SettlesThough 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. The problem is compounded by the fact that she has shifted her headquarters. For years she was based in the living room, but for the last few months mum has insisted on sitting in the conservatory. Even plants struggle to survive here in the summer. If you bring her a tea and she falls asleep and fails to drink it, even after an hour here it will still be warm. 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. Mum used to say something similar if she ever lost her marbles – which meant her mind, and which is now escaping her more and more often. Trying to find time for yourself plus, a carer could feel isolated due to their life being so full on they are too tired to invest in anything else. Free time (if any) means flopping in a chair or bed! Takes less effort lol