Saturday

Another day at Lesley’s dad’s house. Another day where we had to deal with Lesley having No Head.

The Dog worked out what was happening early on as usual. She spotted the signs. Bags being packed with walking boots and socks, a change of harness so that we could remove one that would inevitably get wet on her walk and so on. The car got loaded with all the stuff that was heading off to the charity shop. We’d worked out that his house was going to be a halfway house for it rather than have it cluttering up ours.

We’ve done the trip far more often than I care to think and you would imagine that the final checklist as we walk out the door would be a matter of routine. You would also imagine that the keys to his house would be at or near the top that list. We were half an hour into the journey there when it struck Lesley that she’d left her set at home. It was only a minor issue as I’d made sure that I had my set before we left. But there’s only one key to his garage in existence and that was on Lesley’s set. I would have to forgo another chance to sort through his store of hazardous belongings. So the issue wasn’t whether we’d be able to get in achieve something towards clearing his house. The issue was more about Lesley’s head being so full of all that needs doing that she’d forgotten something basic and also that she hadn’t heard me ask her whether she had the keys when I was standing right next to her. I think we both found those issues troubling.

The Dog knows the routine when we get to the house – she sits by the front door and cries until we take her out for a walk. She loves the walks there and she chooses the route. She picked a new variation today but we still ended up at the chalk stream so  she could have a game fetching sticks out of the water.

With The Dog worn out and sleepy we set about sorting through a set of drawers in his dining room. They were full to bursting. Progress felt rapid with both of us working in the same room.

Dad had been rebuffing Lesley’s offers to help sort through these drawers for decades and had always insisted that he’d already done it and everything needed to be kept. He’d done that for every drawer and cupboard in the house to be honest.

There were no bombshell finds today. The most significant ones were statements from banks and letters from hospitals that Lesley should have seen long ago.

“Why didn’t he tell me about these when they came in? He hadn’t been coping for years.”

I kept my feeling that the dates on them might tell us when his dementia had started to be a problem to myself but the frequency with which he’d stuff something important in a drawer to be forgotten started getting regular four or five years ago.

That was certainly true of batteries for his hearing aids. He never had enough. There were stacks of them in one drawer.

We established a rhythm. I’d say something like “Why has he kept this?” or “Why on earth did he buy this?” or just “Huh!?”.

Lesley’s answer would be the same.

“No idea. Bin it.”

We’d had enough after two drawers and I headed back upstairs to fill a box with stuff that I could take away and sort through unsupervised. In a cupboard where he kept his painting and decorating catalogues I spotted a briefcase that I thought I recognised. Inside was my name and address. Not a recent address either. My address from when I was still living at home with Mum & Dad. Alongside it were cardboard folders with my writing on including a one which I’d labelled “DL/1 Manual” – a programmer’s reference that was out of date in the mid-1980s when I threw it away.

He’d seen me put stuff out to go to the dump, offered to take it for me and kept it instead for decades. A conversation we’d had with him as the decision to move him into a nursing home was becoming all but unavoidable came to mind.

“But if I go into a home, what’s going to happen to all my stuff?”

I remembered congratulating myself at the time for not saying we’d be hiring a skip to get rid of it all.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. April 2025.