The Room
(aka Oh God He's Writing About Death Again)
This time last week I was with my sister sorting through Mum's belongings in the room at her care home.
There's the joke (is it a joke, or is it just bleak humour from the truth?) that in hospital you know your time's up when they move your bed next to the exit. Well, after Mum's initial fall and confinement to bed, that is exactly what happened. She was relocated from her old room at the bottom of the corridor to one right by the carer's station by the exit. I guess it enabled the carers to get to her quickly if she fell out of bed and activated the alarm mat.
I guess as they weren't expecting her to last too long because her belongings were kind of dumped in drawers and cupboards with no real thought to organisation.
We were under the impression that we could donate her clothes to the home, but they were adamant that all mum's stuff had to be gone. So we went through her wardrobe, finding clothes in styles she'd never wear with no name tag on and bagging them up. I think we donated quite a lot of other people's clothes to charity.
What was really remarkable was the amount of paper in her room. She seemed to spend a lot of time taking the paper towels out of the dispenser near her sink and neatly folding them into squares. So many squares of paper towels; in between the pages of books she lacked the capacity to read, stuffed inside envelopes, wedged into cardigan pockets, stacked in a drawer, hidden in boxes and bags.
One thing that made me well up was the diary that we brought her in the early days of her joining the home. Every time anyone visited they would register the time and length of visit. There were entries like "[Sister] visited, brought chocolates, watched the singer in the lounge, looked at photos" and "[Son] 16:30 - 17:00. Brought supplies" and "Whole family came for birthday celebrations, cake was lovely" That book disappeared after about 6 months and nobody could find it. On that Friday it was on the top of a pile of paper squares in her top drawer. This book wasn't for her benefit but for ours. She would forget a visitor within moments of them leaving her presence, so it allowed us visitors to keep track of each other and avoid those:
Me: "Did your enjoy seeing [Sister] yesterday?"
Mum: "I've not seen her for weeks"
type of conversations that were so prevalent early on. It reminded me of how comparatively well she was early on compared to how she was was towards the end.
It took two hours to clear her room. We were ruthless, but each took things that we wanted to keep. A massive contrast to when my dad died and spent a fortnight clearing 40 years of memories and belongings from their house into a skip.
Mum had been at the home for nearly 10 years, the longest serving inhabitant until her death. That home has also been part of my life for those 10 years and it's weird to think I won't be going there again.
Life goes on, I guess.