A Silent Tsunami (eBook)

Swimming Against the Tide of my Mother's Dementia

Anthea Rowan (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
336 Seiten
Bedford Square Publishers (Verlag)
978-1-83501-058-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A Silent Tsunami is a unique combination of memoir and medicine - Rowan forensically examines the development of her mother's illness and explores dementia in a frank but illuminating, lyrical and moving way. 'By turns, warm, reflective, angry, but always moving... the perfect balance between scientific context and the mother-daughter narrative'Professor Craig Ritchie, University of St Andrews 'Anthea captures so eloquently the tug of war between a daughter and her mother 'who is being erased''Manni Coe, author of the bestselling brother. do. you. love. me. Anthea Rowan writes about her mother's struggles of living with Dementia, while interpreting the science that surrounds this devestating illness. Grounded in personal observation, she casts an unflinching eye on the realities of living with a mother who has forgotten her daughter and a determination that her children will not face the same. There is hope here, too. As a portrayal of the relationships we share with our mothers, an examinaion of their influences on us, as well as asking questions about how illness impacts lives, A Silent Tsunami is a powerful story of family, life, love and loss.

Anthea Rowan is a writer, journalist and blogger. She writes for newspapers and magazines across the world. She contributes to Vogue, the Washington Post, The Irish Times and the South China Morning Post.

Textauszug

Chapter 1: Storm Warning

December 2019

When I go down the beach at dawn, the night’s high tide has swept it clean. I look across the sand before I walk to the waterline and hesitate briefly, reluctant to sully its smoothness with my footprints.

It’s as if yesterday’s story – a story of families who played here, built sandcastles, threw towels down to lie on, chucked a ball for a dog, flew a kite – has been rubbed out. Battlements and towers cast of bucket and spade and strung with a bunting of seaweed have been levelled. Holes dug have been filled. Evidence of hundreds of feet erased. Today the beach will write a new story on sand clean as a fresh page.

I walk across this clean-slate-sand now and wade into the water. I look back. And there it is: the first line of my story for the day, my even tread in shallow indentations down to the shore: a clue to how I began my morning.

I break the surface easily as I swim out, I can feel the power of every stroke, propelling me forward, faster, further; further than I mean to. I’m startled when I stop and roll onto my back and see the smallness of the house on the cliff. I have swum until I am just a dot if you’re sitting up there, on the veranda, where we will sit later. Over breakfast somebody might say, ‘You went out miles today, I could only just see you: a dot on the horizon.’

I float for a bit, watch the sun peel the sky bright blue then swim back to the shore. I walk back up the beach towards the house. I gather up the towel I left slung on a branch and rub myself dry. I look back at the sea as I do – and there it is: another sentence in the sand. Another day; another story.

* * *

The evening my mother forgot who I was – who I am – was just like the one that had come before, and the one before that. Weeks of evenings all alike. I puzzled about that later. Why that evening? Why so sudden? So that at lunchtime she knew I was her daughter and by nightfall she didn’t.

Six hours later. That’s all it took. All the time it took for her view of me to become something else entirely, and for mine of the sea to change completely: the jade and green of the sun-dappled sandy shallows of a low tide to be drowned out by heaving, high black water.

A quite different story would be written on the beach the next day: I wouldn’t swim the next morning.

I say to myself afterwards and often, over and over, ‘I’ll never, ever forget what that felt like; I’ll never, ever forget this day.’

And I say to my children, who witness my devastation at my mother’s forgetting who I am, and begin to worry that one day they’ll experience the same: ‘I’ll never ever forget you, I promise.’

But how do you know?

You don’t.

* * *

As one of a panel discussion on Dementia entitled ‘Alzheimer’s: Like a Tsunami, by the time you see it, it is too late,’ Professor Craig Ritchie, CEO and Founder of Scottish Brain Sciences and Professor of Brain Health and Neurodegenerative Medicine at the University of St Andrews, was quoted as saying, ‘We talk about there being a long, silent period of this disease before Dementia develops, but it’s only silent because we are not listening properly.’

I wasn’t listening, and by the time I heard the roar of the turn of a tide, the rise of a wave, it was too late to do anything.

* * *

The veranda faces the ocean and the east so that at dawn, when the sun pokes long fingers beneath the eaves, and pinches, we sit with spines straight against the back wall. We huddle in mean shade and drink tea.

Mum fans herself impatiently with an old envelope somebody has used as a shopping list so that I can see what was bought – tomato sauce, baking powder, bath soap – and what was not (brown rice and cotton wool remain unchecked). Mum, fresh from an autumnal Ireland, complains regularly about our East African equatorial heat.

When we sit out here later though, at dusk, at the tipping end of the day, we draw our chairs from the morning’s back wall out onto the lawn, so that we can catch the breeze and watch the sea and the sky.

Some evenings, on a rising tide, the surf, a frill of white lace at its throat, runs up the sand chasing ghost crabs and obliterating the tread of their small weight in a single lick. Over and over that story is told: one minute the sand is patterned with tiny prints, the next it isn’t and no sooner has the water receded then the crabs scuttle out again, a relentless race to see which story will stick.

‘Can I get you a beer, Mum?’

‘That would be lovely.’

I fetch two bottles and pour one for her. She watches me and comments as her glass begins to bead sweat, ‘That looks nice and cold’ she says, with a laugh.

I sit opposite her and raise my bottle before I sip, ‘Cheers, Ma.’

At night, when the breeze drops, the ocean’s song will seem louder and I will think of the conch shells my father held to my ear as a child: ‘Can you hear the sea?’ he’d ask and I would listen intently and then politely I would tell him that yes, yes I could. The rush of blood in my ears as a tidal hymn.

We are quiet for a bit then, Mum and I, drinking in the darkening view and our beers. Stars begin to puncture the sky with sputtering pinpricks of brightness. They appear, one after the other, as if some celestial body is putting a lit match to the wicks of overhead lamps.

And then, it was then, as the day sunk to its haunches, that Mum said: ‘Tell me,’ and she leant towards me, ‘When did we first meet?’

*

Afterwards, I will understand better the watery metaphors that drench Dementia; when you start to look, to listen, you hear them everywhere: Dementia is described as a ‘wave’, a ‘rising tide’, an ‘emergent tsunami’. Politicians, poets, academics wade through the language, sieving it for the right words. Dementia is flooding services.

But what I learn myself is that long before we, the well, feel the cold rise of that tide, the sick have already begun to drown.

*

Later I will also understand that we all do what I did in the face of Dementia: make excuses.

She’s overtired, I told myself when Mum could not follow a conversation, perhaps she needs a nap. She’s distracted, dehydrated, hungry – did she eat lunch? – when she asked a question that was not anchored by context or common sense. She’s just old, her humour misguided; when she warned my vegetarian daughter she shouldn’t eat marmalade on her toast because the skins suspended in the jelly were made from animal hide. She’s having a Senior Moment.

And much, much later, when I read Ritchie’s words, I know he is right: Dementia is only silent because we are not listening.

It murmurs its way into the world. You need to keep an ear cocked to this thing. It could be there in the background. It could be.

Listen?

I am not sure if we do not hear it because our ears are full of sand. Or because we don’t want to. Do we miss it because we cannot imagine a fine mind – not her! – shredded? Does fatalism render us deaf: it’ll happen to us all in the end.

So we, I, looked instead, for palatable, passing, friendly reasons for the soft, slow fraying of a person’s – of my mother’s – cognition.

She’s overtired. She’s distracted, dehydrated, hungry – did she eat lunch? Perhaps she needs a nap? She’s just old; she’s having a Senior Moment.

When I track back, when I think about it now, my vision lit by hindsight, my head inclined to Dementia’s soft, slow tread, clues abound. Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs which I either didn’t want to see, or dismissed as nothing of consequence. So I stepped clean over them.

I rake my memory now as if looking for something precious – my daughter’s charm bracelet, a 21st birthday gift which fell off her wrist as she ran on the beach and I imagined it gone forever. I had almost given up looking for it when suddenly there it was, winking at me, a curl of silver in the sand. It is only then, when I look, when I really look, that I remember another morning, a year – maybe more – before Mum forgot me.

That morning, as we sat over breakfast, I noticed Mum staring at something in the middle distance.

‘What are you looking at, Ma?’ I asked.

‘That plant,’ she motioned, gesturing towards the lemongrass in a pot, ‘what can I see beneath its feathers?’

I frowned, puzzled: ‘Leaves, Mum,’ I said, ‘you mean beneath its leaves.’

‘Yes. Beneath its leaves,’ Mum confirmed, unfazed.

Nobody else at the breakfast table seemed to notice, not my husband ploughing through bacon and eggs. Not my son, thumbing his phone.

‘Feathers.’ The wrong word, slid in with such exquisite subtlety it would have been easy to miss.

One word. What’s one word, one ordinary word substituted for another ordinary word?

Feathers for leaves.

Dementia was whispering.

But now that I’ve noticed it, now that I see it writ large in our lives, it screams at me.

Shouts. Insists: a person is diagnosed with Dementia every three seconds.

* * *

There must have been a second split by disbelief.

Like when you’ve been slapped across the face: a moment before you feel the sting of it, seconds before the rose blooms on your...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.9.2024
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Krankheiten / Heilverfahren
• Schlagworte: Daughter • dementia • Depression • Healthcare • Memoir • mental health memoir • mother
• ISBN-10: 1-83501-058-X / 183501058X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-83501-058-7 / 9781835010587