My father, a handful of spoons and his journey to dementia

TIn the last year of his life, the days are long with Dad. He usually sleeps in a hospital bed in the corner of the room, while I sit quietly on the couch hoping he will sleep a little longer. I sit and watch him, afraid he’s stopped breathing, and listen to the radio playing pop songs that turn the room into a time machine. “Catch a bright star and place it on your forehead…,” T Rex’s Ride a White Swan takes me back to 1970, watching Top of the Pops in this room dad teases us with Marc Bolan’s shoes or Noddy Holder’s trousers.

When he wakes up, I ask him if he remembers the song. He shakes his head slowly. “I can’t remember anything…” Even trying to remember is too hard and so, as the song fades away, we fall into silence again until he asks if we can look at spoons.

At the age of 92, bedridden, lost in dementia land and not really ‘dad’ anymore, he likes to look through cutlery. He points to my mother’s cabinet of curiosities and asks if we can look through the drawers and then sits up in bed and looks through corkscrews, forks and spoons. There are silver teaspoons, sewing hooks, cigarette holders and caddy spoons. He likes to pick up every piece of cutlery and hold it up to the light like a man who has never seen a spoon in his life. “That’s one Nice spoon. It’s probably worth at least £10!” We appreciate the beauty of the spoon.

For a moment he no longer lives in the elsewhere of dementia. He is back to being the junk dealer he used to be and we sell in his shop the old brown furniture and crockery that we bought for little money in auction rooms. Seeing him enchanted by these copper and silver treasures is like watching a child lost in wonder. For now, he’s a junk man again, just for a fleeting moment, enough to make me cry.

Suddenly the junk shop disappears and we find ourselves in the waiting room of a train station, but we’re not sure where we’re going. My father is worried and doesn’t want to be here. He can’t bear to travel. The station is busy and there is too much going on here to settle down. He’s worried about who will pay for the tickets and wants to know how far we are from home.

Then, towards noon, we are in an imaginary garden full of children playing. He enjoys their laughter and he laughs too, as they chase each other around the lawn and enjoy themselves. He sits in a lounge chair and quietly enjoys the visitors, raising his hand to wave as they skip away into the shade.

He closes his eyes, as if blocking out the view of the garden, and it occurs to me that these children are are children. They are me and my two sisters. The room is almost silent, except for the old songs and the slow breathing of the old man in bed. I feel like the world we knew is disappearing. Soon the children will no longer play in the garden.

In the afternoon we watch television programs about car boot sales and antiques. He shakes his head, shocked by what he sees, and turns to look at the garden birds. “Why would anyone want to waste their life with all that trash?” I don’t remind him anymore that he used to sell junk for a living because it irritates him. He can enter that world of old furniture in the waking dream of dementia, but in… this world, where it really happened, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

We switch channels and watch A place in the sunand he says he has never been to Spain. There are pictures of him on a Spanish holiday with my mother. He doesn’t seem to remember my mother.

Sometimes I go upstairs and rummage through wardrobes and cupboards, finding things like thimbles and old coins and putting them in my pocket. It feels important to collect little treasures, things he has touched and kept. In a suitcase in my nursery I find gum cards, seashells and Christmas crackers, each object with a memory.

He calls for help and I go downstairs to find him hunched over at the bottom of the bed. He doesn’t know where his legs are and wants me to find them. I rummage through the covers and tell him I found them. “They were here all along!” He is relieved. When he asks me if I found anything interesting upstairs, I empty my pockets and show him the little treasures. He touches each enchanted object and then looks at my arthritic hands, wondering what’s wrong with them, but can’t find the words to ask. We hold each other’s hands.

We are each other’s companions, but we both feel lost and lonely now that my sister Kathryn is back at work. The days drag on forever and I feel like there is so much I don’t know about dementia, this strange and cruel disease. He doesn’t understand his own condition and neither do I, no matter how much I read about it.

My own health is declining and the list continues to grow: two types of arthritis, coronary artery disease, osteoporosis, skin cancer. In a house with broken gutters and drain pipes, rain in the hall, cracks in the facade and a collapsing garage, we live in a time of endings, and I come to believe that this broken house is us.

After my mother’s death, I didn’t go home for seventeen years. Dad didn’t want anyone to visit. His heart was broken and he didn’t know how to mend it or explain how much it hurt. I met him in the auction room and then we went for a pint in the Rose & Crown, and we mostly sat in silence, as we always had. We liked the silence. We got along well, but had no desire to talk. Or maybe it was easier not to. Then we loaded the van with furniture and went our separate ways.

When I finally went home, while he was in the hospital after a fall, I returned to the home of a hoarder. Each room was packed with furniture from floor to ceiling. In the center of this labyrinth of wardrobes and cupboards stood an armchair and a kettle. Lost without my mother, he had filled the void with Victorian furniture and crockery. In fact, he had filled the empty space with sadness. And then, with increasing vulnerability and the isolation of Covid, he became his own ghost, a lost soul in a labyrinth of wardrobes.

I’m torn between not wanting to be here and feeling like this is the most important place to be. We watch the birds – the real birds – in the garden, the wood pigeons and blackbirds, the goldfinches and sparrows, and the occasional exciting visit from the woodpecker. This is his only pleasure. Well, this and the drawer full of spoons.

Soon my sister will come home from work and we will eat our Marks & Spencer microwave dinner while Dad disappears back into dementia land and falls asleep as the long day finally comes to an end. We sleep in the quiet house, hoping he sleeps through the night. When he do waking up and calling for help, he doesn’t seem to know who we are. His long life was not meant to end this way. In this void. He says he wants to die. In his sleep. He’s had enough – and why is he still here? As much as we love him, we understand his wish. He pleads with me, as if I were in charge of death. Guilty I hope he gets his wish.

I find a photo of my parents on their bikes in Amsterdam – dad leaning, mum on the backrest “Dutch”. I show it to dad and he asks who the people are. I tell him he is the man and the woman is my mother. He looks at me confused and says calmly: “She looks like a very nice lady, I think she might have been my wife…”

I went home to get it get some sleep when my sister calls at four in the morning to tell me daddy’s wish has come true. I think how much I want to sit with him again, watch his fascination as he looks through the cutlery drawer, holds each piece up to the light like a child on Christmas Day, shakes his head slightly and says, “That’s a Nice spoon. It’s probably worth at least £10!” And I think, if only we could go there again, back to those long days in that living room, and sit quietly looking through the spoons.

Wild Twin by Jeff Young is published by Little Toller Books for £20. Buy a copy for £18 from Guardianbookshop.com