Poppa’s now in the Mt Wilga rehabilitation facility. About a
week before I am writing now, my parents, my sister (back from Perth) and I all
visited him at this place, all of us except dad for the first time. The back
entrance we used was pretty drab and dreary, with a hideous concrete courtyard
before it. Inside the place wasn’t too bad though, just a typical hospital-type
building interior with a muted colour scheme, soap dispensers everywhere and
nurses hurrying up and down the corridors. Before we walked in, I remember my
dad had said, to sort of prepare us for entry, that “It smells like
disinfectant and urine”. When I did walk in the door, I couldn’t immediately
detect the urine, only the metallic smell of disinfectant. As we continued to
walk along a corridor, I soon noticed a faint whiff of ammonia as well. But
even that wasn’t so bad. The place was, in a word, ungrim.
And when we all walked into
Poppa’s room, which was on the right side of an end-of-corridor cul-de-sac, he
was sitting on a chair with his lunch on a tray in front of him. And for the
first time in all the times I’d visited him, his eyes lit up (and not in a
crazy wide-eyed stare) and he greeted us quite cheerily. I can’t remember exactly
what he said, but I remember it was surprisingly bright and he seemed
surprisingly lucid. There weren’t many chairs in the room so my mum and I ended
up sitting on a bed to the left of his chair, with my sister sitting near us,
and my dad closest to him. He was a bit confused about the lid that was meant
to go over his lunch, which he kept moving about and about a few other things
on his tray that he continually fidgeted with, but I think it was far and away
the best I’d seen him. When dad showed him a photo of some desert plain he’d
visited on the week-long solitary trip to Cooper’s Creek that he went on last
year, Poppa exclaimed that it was “a beauty”. He was immediately able to
interpret the photo and immediately able to formulate a coherent response. That
was very encouraging.
Funnily, though, at times, it
seemed the brain damage to his frontal lobe really had disinhibited him (that’s
what my dad was saying anyway). One of these times was when my dad showed poppa
another photograph of a coffee table he’d constructed himself, after a rather
long preamble about the provenance of his materials – the wood being from
railway sleepers and the stand being a simple trestle – and how that meant it
was rough, and about how despite sanding then polishing the wood so that it’s
smooth and the colour of the wood is a really lovely rich red it’s not perfect.
Most of it seemed to be intended to lower Poppa’s expectations (whom my dad has
told me numerous times was a very skilled woodworker). Anyway, as soon as my
dad actually showed him the photo, Poppa exclaimed, with a look of horror,
“Jesus!”
I laughed at that, and I think my
mum and my sister did too. I mean, I don’t know if he said “Jesus” because he had
actually comprehended the long and rather preamble and had actually properly
interpreted the photo and thought it was an abysmal coffee table and couldn’t
inhibit himself from verbally releasing that thought, or if it was just that
the close-up on the really bright, blood-red table, covered in dark ridges and
small dark holes looked like something else, perhaps something macabre or
grisly or just shocking on his first glance, and that was why he uttered that word
so quickly.
One of the strange things about
post-stroke Poppa is his misuse of words. As his language cortex (or whatever
it’s called) has been damaged by the stroke, he seems to struggle to express
himself, taking a lot of time, and even often after that time blatantly using
the wrong word. One such time was when he said he was going to move his food
tray into a more “Legal position”. Another time was when Poppa was giving us a
sort of farewell speech. He actually started trying to get us to leave only
about 15 minutes after we arrived, which we didn’t really view as rude because apparently
holding a conversation is exhausting for someone with only a part-functioning
brain, requiring intense concentration, and he did it in a truly odd way. I’m
now writing this months after the visit so I can’t remember much detail, but I
do remember the speech being very formal and polite-sounding, something like
this, “Well it’s been a great. Party. We’ve had a swell time. But I think now
it might be time for you to leave.” The interesting thing about this and the
use of “Party” is that I couldn’t figure out if he was deluded and thought he
was hosting a party or if he just couldn’t think of the right word and that was
the first to come to mind. I mean, even in that visit he had shown signs of
delusion, talking about needing to “pack his bags” and “help Jan with the car”,
so that may well be the case there. But I think we all hoped that he just
couldn’t think of the word. It was a beautiful speech. We all left happy.
Update from many, many weeks after this:
He’s now in a nursing home called Regis in Hornsby Heights, which costs a ridiculous – seriously fucking
ridiculous – amount of dosh and which Beama only chose because it was the only
one that had a single room available for Poppa. Our whole family went there a
couple of days ago after having Yum Cha at Taxim
restaurant in Hornsby. It’s just off the main road – Galston road, I think
it is – hidden by hedges. It’s a single story complex, painted white, and has
that standard hospital-type look – pretty much what you’d expect. Inside, it
also looks pretty standard. As is also
pretty standard, it had a vaguely unpleasant smell a bit like Mt Wilga:
disinfectant and a hint of something else. Poppa is currently in a room just
past the reception area, to the right off the corridor. The room is pretty
small and rudimentary and boring. It’s painted white like the rest of the
place, and has a small window on the far wall, a big plain brown
wardrobe/cabinet and a table to your direct right as you walk in, a big
hospital-type bed along the right wall, a TV affixed high up on the left wall,
a chair, another table with wheels, and a bathroom which had an armchair and
something else in it when we walked in. All the various Aitkens had made it a
bit less bleak and basic by bringing in a corkboard with lots of photos – of
Poppa and Beama together, of his offspring and of his grandkids.
I hadn’t seen him for ages when
we made this visit, but had been constantly getting updates on his condition
from dad. I’d heard that he kept getting urinary tract infections at Mt Wilga
and that that kept making him tired and mentally slow because they have an
effect on your brain apparently, and that he had generally deteriorated since
we saw him that day in Mt Wilga. When we were parking the car at the place, my
dad had said to us that we should prepare for a bit of a shock, which is
typical of him, but probably was also a sensible thing to tell us. I don’t
think I really need that preparation, however, as I’d already had my shock way
back in North Shore Hospital the first time I saw him.
This time, well, he was
incoherent almost uniformly and he said some deluded things and kept pulling
his pants down and kept scratching himself which dad kept telling him not to
because he was going to get more sores and his skin was thin from years of some
medication. But, on the bright side, he did talk a lot and some of it was coherent and there were a couple of
jokes. Plus, the message to stop scratching did sink in on some level because
after scratching his forehead at one point he said to himself “Must stop
scratching”. Something else arguably positive was that a lot of what he said
was either intentionally or unintentionally funny: I laughed a few times at a
few things he said and suppressed a laugh at a few other things he said. One
thing that he said that dad assured me was an intentional joke came after my
dad asked “Who’s that?” while pointing at a picture of himself on the corkboard
which he’d brought over to the bed. This was Poppa’s reply: “On a good day,
he’s not a bad bloke”. This caused my dad to laugh and the rest of us to grin,
maybe. There were also a couple of very memorable unintentionally funny things
he said. The first was elicited by my dad saying, for about the third time, that
he really must stop scratching. This was his reply: “I have to give up a lot of
things now that I’m among – the performance people”. While clearly a product of
his damaged language cortex, this one was funny just because of the phrase,
“performance people”, which almost does seem like a good way to describe being
a senile invalid, considering they’re constantly being monitored and cleaned
and probed by other people, never alone.
The second came after he asked
what the object was just outside his door (a hoist used for lifting the
patients into showers, only whose wheel was visible) and my dad went over and
dragged it into view. This was his response: “I should know that. I have to
deal with that bugger every morning.” This was funny mainly because it was so
out of the blue in its coherence and coz he said bugger.
So could be heaps worse.
Update from a few weeks after
this:
About an hour ago mum came into the study where I was
sitting, laptop on my lap, next to the door. Tears were welling up in her eyes
and her face was wobbling and looked as if it was about to melt. Suddenly she
bent down and hugged me. The embrace lasted for ages, like one from a Hollywood
film. I knew what it meant: dad had been right about Poppa being moribund these
past two days – Poppa was dead. As my mum told me in a quavering voice and
wobbling face what dad had presumably just told her on the phone about Poppa’s
last moments, a lot of thoughts were running through my head. I was thinking
about how surprisingly strong my mum’s reaction to the news was; I was thinking
about how a funeral might have to be arranged and about how that might be
during the next week and how the poems that my mum just found on the internet
would certainly be recited; I was thinking about special access schemes and
how, hypothetically, if I could be bothered filling out some forms, this loss
of a family member might qualify me for some extra ATAR points; I was thinking
about how my dad would be feeling having just lost his dad and how Beama would
be feeling having just lost her husband of so many decades, and hoping that the
long period of Poppa’s invalidity had diminished the shock of his final passing
to them; and I was thinking about my own reaction to his passing, questioning
whether my feeling of near indifference was wrong and whether I should be
feeling more. Because of that last thought, I began to try and conduct an audit
of my memories of Poppa as my mother spoke, to go through them in a sort of
Powerpoint presentation, as an exercise in solemn remembrance. I only managed
this for about two seconds.
After my mum finished her
monologue, I didn’t say anything to her. I just sat looking up at her from the
chair and smiled then looked out the window and stared pensively for a while then
looked back at her and smiled again. I had no idea of the correct protocol in
such a situation and so felt slightly awkward. She ended this awkwardness
sooner than I’d expected, slowly closing the door and leaving only about half a
minute after she’d finished talking.
Upon her exit, I quickly stopped
thinking about Poppa altogether. I figured life goes on and I began to do my
homework on Greek vases. I’ve now finished that.
I still feel near indifference
and I’m still not sure whether that’s ok.
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