Deborah Moggach dares to tell the truth about
caring for a parent ravaged by dementia
W
hen my mother died, I didn’t
cry. Quite honestly, I was
relieved. The person I’d
loved had long since gone,
lost to dementia three years earlier.
My mother, Charlotte Hough, was
a lively, witty children’s writer and
illustrator. She’d always beena
bit eccentric. By the age
of 80, however, she was
getting increasingly odd.
I remember gardening
with her and noticing that
she was pulling out all the
plants and leaving the
weeds, whistling tunelessly
under her breath. She became obsessive,
too, firing off angry notes to people who’d
offended her and always ‘sorting out’ her
paperwork, which remained the same.
Then she broke her leg and had to go
to hospital. When things are mentallyslipping, one clings to small routines
— walking the dog, buying the paper —
and hospital destroys all that. When she
left, she seemed to have visibly shrunk
into a confused and frightened old lady.
At that time, I lived directly opposite her- and for a while, with the help of my
sister,wecould cope. The confusion
came and went. Sometimes
she’d be fine, then she’d
suddenly ask, ‘What university
did my dog go to?’ Concerned,
we took her for tests and she
was finally diagnosed with
vascular dementia.
We agreed on two things:
one, that we needed help. And two, that
we didn’t want to put her into a home. Our
mother’s familiar surroundings were very
important, and her house had a spare
bedroom which could be used for live-in
help. So we started searching for a carer.
At the hospital, we’d met a
lovely Irish woman, who had
been massaging the feet of an
elderly patient, and we’d taken
her phone number. So we rang
her and found that her patient
had just died. She agreed to be
our mother’s carer, with the help
of two other friends of hers.
They’d take it in rotas, around
the clock. Even though they had
no qualifications or references,
they called themselves carers.
But we were desperate, and we
liked them, and we thought it
would be a temporary thing
until we’d got a plan in place.
We never did. With dementia,
I realised, one lurches from
moment to moment, from one crisis to
another, and there is never a second to
properly sort things out.A losing battle
So these three chatty, capable Irish
women moved into our lives and thus
began the most extraordinary two years.
As my mother became more of a
stranger, they became closer than family.
I adored them, they were life-savers, and
we had some surprisingly larky times.
I was deeply grateful to them, while
also, ridiculously, resenting their intimacy
with someone who was withdrawing from
me into her final illness. I disapproved
of the way that they infantilised her, evenWhy I never
cried when
‘I felt
chronically
guilty’
Mum died
Deborah’s mum Charlotte^
was a great writer
and loved dogs