Travels with my mother XIII: Home

This is the thirteenth in my series called Travels with my Mother. If you’ve not read the first in the series, you might wish to have a look at that one as it gives the context behind these posts.

In the past two years my mother has been hospitalised twice due to medical problems that required treatment and different care than that available to her at her nursing home. Both occasions saw a dramatic increase in her confusion and delusions, partly due to the medical conditions she was suffering from, and partly due to the sudden change in her surroundings and routines.

This year I’ve been conscious that a good number of our elderly folk have been ending up in hospital because of Covid-19. How much of a strain that must be for the patients, especially so for those with dementia. Whisking away everything that is familiar to a person living with dementia can mean the severing of attachments that keeps that person grounded, if only marginally or sporadically, to their place in time and space.

While Mum was in hospital she scanned the ward from her bed, in a vain search for the two items that connect her to her nursing home room. The first is a colourful bed cover made of tiny patchwork pieces that she sewed herself, many years ago. The second is a small cane chair that she and her siblings bought for their father on his return from WWII service in Palestine and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Sitting by her bed each day, I was able to reassure Mum that those precious items were still in her room at the nursing home and that she would return to them soon.

How incredibly lost a dementia sufferer in a Covid ward must feel, with no familiar things in sight, no loved ones to visit, a different routine, and staff dressed head to toe in PPE that looks a lot like a space suit.

For Mum, the most troubling thing about her time in hospital was her inability to remember or even imagine what her “home'” looked like or where it was. She asked me about it every time I visited and every time a nurse or doctor mentioned that she might be “going home” soon. Where is “home”? I don’t know where “home” is any more. She took to referring to “home” with air quotes around the word, as if it was no longer a real place but simply a concept, one that she was struggling to understand.

It got me to think about what “home” means to me and what it once meant to my mother, who can now no longer remember the many homes she has lived in over her ninety one years.

Is “home” where we feel safe? Is it the place where our loved ones are? Or a place from our past that we recall with fondness? Many adult children still refer to visits to parents, or the home they grew up in, as “going home.” Can we have two or more homes: those from our past and the one we now reside in?

For my mother, and many others like her, “home” is now an idea. I’m no longer sure if it forms part of her reality.

#travelswithmymother