A care home story you should know...
Every Wednesday, the kitchen at my mother's care home cooks one meal that almost nobody will eat, and there's a ninety-four-year-old woman there who asks for everyone else's leftovers of it. I thought she was a really strange woman, then her reasoning embarrassed me. I have watched her for the better part of a year now, while I've sat with my mother, and the question she put into my mind, quietly at first, then loudly, then so insistently that I couldn't sleep for it, turned out to have an answer. An answer that has changed everything for my mother. And one that I think you need to hear, wherever you are, whoever it is you find yourself sitting beside. My mother is called Sheila. She is seventy-nine. She went into the home a year and a half ago, and I want to be clear about why, because it matters to the rest of this: it was not her mind that put her there. It was her body. A fall, and then a second fall, and then the quiet verdict we all came to without quite saying it out loud, that she could not manage the house on her own anymore. Her hip, her balance, the stairs she could no longer trust. That was what took her out of her home of forty years and into a single room with a number on the door. The mind, we told ourselves, was just tired. Just shaken by the upheaval. Just her age. She had always been the capable one. My mother ran a household, a part-time job and the better part of my father's affairs for decades without ever appearing to break a sweat. But in the year or two before the falls, and faster once she was in the home, something had gone quiet in her. She lost her words. She would reach for a name, mine, sometimes, and not find it, and cover the gap with a vague little wave of the hand. She forgot conversations we'd had the same afternoon. She stopped following the programmes she'd always loved because, she admitted once, she couldn't hold the thread of them from one end to the other. I would visit and find her sitting by the window not doing an
