Saturday

The visit today was much earlier and briefer than usual. We were trying to cram in a quick visit to Mum before heading off for a day at Lesley’s dad’s. Lesley took The Dog off for a walk  from the car park at The Home, through the fields and down to the river while I went in to see Mum.

Mum was marginally more awake today than she had been yesterday but was less communicative. More comfortable but less happy.

That’s not to say that she was miserable as she often is when coming out of a Sleepy Mum phase. This was Mum being quietly resigned to how and where she was.

It was a Feeling Sorry For Herself day.

As per usual, I ran out of things to say pretty quickly so asked…

“Shall I read to you for a bit Mum?”

“Why?”

It was undeniably a good question.

Lesley’s dad seemed to be in pretty good shape. Physically at least. We took him in his current favourite lunch – an M&S sandwich – but he could only manage half of it.

The level of confusion had gone up a bit. He’d got confused by his central heating programmer again. It’s been a few weeks since he’d fiddled with it but he’d managed to switch his hot water off completely.

He’d also fiddled with his hearing aids and only one of them was working. I’m going to have to take the tools we need on every visit now. There’s a possibility that the non-functional hearing aid was just blocked with wax. He swore that he was putting oil in his ears to keep them clean every day but the level in the dispenser didn’t seem to be any different. My guess was that he’d lost the strength in his fingers to be able to press the button rather than that he’d forgotten to do it.

Or perhaps it was both of the above.

Bibliography

Tales from the Parish: 31 humorous short stories about community, family and village life, set in the English countryside

Kindle Edition

by Stefania Hartley

Author’s Note

My Mum is in a nursing home in a small village in the Thames Valley. The photo is not of the home. I used an AI image generator to give the reader some idea of the home she’s in.

All, some or maybe even none (you’ll never know!) of the names have been changed to protect privacy and hide real identities. If you think you recognise someone then let me know and I’ll edit the post or remove it entirely