Creative Responses to Dementia

So, as part of this event which was held at the MADe Gallery in Roath by Creative Reponses to Dementia and Making Minds, I was asked to write and read some words inspired by my experience with dementia.

I chose to write a poem about my work as a carer with adults with dementia and a more personal piece of prose about my grandfather.

Here's me reading for the first time as an invited writer:

 

 

 

Here's the poem :

 

 

 

Your Husband

 

A key-lock used to enter,

family photos on the wall,

we check in to on-call service

from the guest phone in the hall.

 

We know where he’ll be sitting,

his care plan and routine,

we know his pills and creams and times

and how he takes his tea.

 

To us he’s Mr Davies

but to you he is just ‘dear’,

or Daddy, Dad or Grandad,

and other names throughout the years.

 

A commode where once were golf clubs,

a dry-pad on his seat,

button alarm around his neck,

catheter bag between his feet .

 

There are tanks outside his window,

there is a man under his bed.

There’s things he sees that we cannot,

the things inside his head.

 

The tanks turn into rubbish trucks,

the man just goes away,

he wonders what we did with him,

he marvels at your name.

 

I know you’re stood outside the door,

to watch me as I care,

as I wipe him, wash him, dress and clean,

you know I know you’re there.

 

So when he says I’m pretty,

or that I’m nice and tall,

I know that you know that he doesn’t know,

 that he doesn’t mean it at all.

 

 

And here is the piece about my grandfather:

 

 

A Boat for One

 

The last time I saw my grandfather, he didn’t know who I was.

To him, I was just another one from the stream of strange faces who came to wash him, dress him, help him go to the toilet.

‘That girl’, he’d call me, ‘that nice young girl’.

Of course I’d just snap straight back into my carer role – guide him to his comfy chair, change his pad, reassure him when I found him wandering the house at night.

I’d be woken by him clattering his zimmer frame into the wooden doors. ‘Hello?’ he’d say, ‘hello?’ Pyjama-clad I’d rush downstairs, ‘Hi Jim’, I’d say.

I’d never called him Jim before.

‘It’s ok, you’re at home’.

 I’d then tuck him back into bed.

I couldn’t see much of what I remembered – the man with the wicked sense of humour who could make anything out of wood, who insisted on going to Ogmore beach every time we visited, completely irregardless of the weather, and had his own special pint glass behind the bar at his local.

Perhaps he was still down there somewhere, smothered by the huge knitted jumpers which used to fit, but now just pooled on the chair around him. They hung as if draped over a scarecrow, his shoulders empty boughs, his knuckles; gnarled oak.

Moth picked and aged, there were too many holes to hold in the straw.

I could see it as it fell through the air, its motes catching golden in the light. I saw it collect in drifts along the floor; heaped memories. Unaware of its significance he stuck to his cleared path, his shambling gait exposing the carpet.

‘I want my wife, Kay, my wife’, he’d say to me, over and over, as I helped him dress.  Momentarily I’d rise to it, ‘I know’ I’d think, ‘I know who she is, that’s my name too.’

But then I’d remember.

And then I’d forget.

‘Pleasantly muddled’, we’d say, ‘Away with the fairies’. An affectionate term, a positive spin.

There wasn’t much else we could do – no emergency brake, no miraculous antidote, no rip cord, no life ring to thrown out to him.

So, together we stood on the shore and waved and smiled as he drifted out in the current. And when he was way out on the horizon, we lifted our arms high in the air to show him we were still watching, were still there. And that even when he couldn’t see us anymore, we could still see him. Still knew him.

He sailed away in a boat for one and we watched him go.

‘That girl’, he said, ‘that nice young girl’.

 

 

x