Last orders – Gill Stannard

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.

The last time I saw my mother she squeezed my hand tight, then vomited. A week later she was dead.

When someone’s been slowly decaying for years, death shouldn’t come as a surprise. But somehow it was. I’d become so used to her zombie existence, though barely a life, it seemed as if it would never end.

Early in the disease, I’d fantasised about death. As Alzheimer’s began to strip her personality, when giving my father respite, I’d toy with ‘forgetting’ to administer her blood pressure medication. Would a week be long enough to trigger a fatal heart attack or stroke?

Decades earlier my mother said, “If I lose my marbles, just set me adrift on an ice floe like the Eskimos.” A witty woman. Always the carer, never the cared for. Those weeks, when I flew home to look after her, I tried to find the courage to push a pillow to her face while she slept.

Each time I failed.

If she’d been aware or pleaded, maybe. But by then she’d forgotten about the Eskimos. No matter how much I loved her, I couldn’t kill her.

It was hardest at the beginning. She’d pace the house, unaccustomed to rest. In a perpetual state of frustration, always busy but never knowing what it was that needed to be done.

She knew something was wrong but did a good job at pretence. There were pat responses, a little vague and nondescript. Her face mimicked interest, not belying the terror growing under the surface.

The nights were challenging. Wet beds, wearing jumpers for pants and raiding the house for cigarettes in the early hours. We’d learned to ration smoking during the day and learned to hide the matches. Though her memory receded, rat cunning prevailed. Half-smoked fags turned up in slippers, pockets and drawers. It’s miraculous that the house didn’t burn down.

My father in his 80s, never the carer always the cared for, did his best. But he took his eye off the ball once too often. Distracted, it took a while before realising the house was quiet. He felt relaxed. That was the give away. There’s never peace when living with the demented.

A stranger found her walking a couple of kilometres away. She was going home to see her mother. My grandmother’s funeral was in 1968; the house bulldozed a decade later to build a supermarket.

Eleven days before my mother died I saw her eyes light up for the last time. It was Christmas, not that she knew it. I lifted a glass to her lips and encouraged a sip. Despite forgetting how to walk, talk and laugh, she still remembered the taste of gin and tonic. In those final nine months spent living in a dementia ward, this moment was her happiest.

The morning my mother died, I got up at dawn to catch a plane. The phone call came five minutes before leaving. Arriving hours later, to a cold body of an unrecognisable woman. Someone no longer my mother, that last remaining sliver departed.

Despite everything, I was still surprised. She was gone.

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