Back home after visiting my folks to pick up some post, drop off my father's birthday present and take a trip over to see my grandmother in her new digs. Not a bad half day, all told...
Things got off to a weird start when, at 10.10 this morning, I got a phone call from the folks who arranged my mortgage. I'd had an email from them last month, reminding me that my fixed rate ends this year, and another last week offering me some improvements on my related health insurance, but had agreed to speak to them sometime next week if work made it impractical this week. The phone call this morning was not from either of the people who emailed me, though, and the most recent email did mention something about "overzealous colleagues"... But, still, ten past ten on a Saturday morning? Really?
Once I got myself out of the door, getting over to my folks was not a bad journey, except that the rail replacement bus smelt somewhere between overripe brie and vomit. At one point, the woman sat next to me asked if the window opened, and I was only too happy to oblige.
Curiously, my grandmother's new accommodation - another care home specialising in Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia - is almost halfway between my home and my parents'... Except not really... just that the route from either location would take about the same length of time by bus. It's a really nice place - slightly smaller, but 'cosy' rather than 'claustrophobic', and they have several lounges dotted about, so it was easy enough to find a quiet place to sit and chat without being interrupted or disturbed by noise from other residents.
Until an alarm went off, that is.
This new place is far more active - not just that they have more residents, the residents themselves interact more (and more freely), and the staff seem to take a bit more interest. That may be an unfair judgement, but I visited the other place over a Bank Holiday weekend, and only saw one nurse.
Grandmother seems well settled and, while she would complain bitterly about her fellow residents and their visitors at the old place, the only complaining she did today was very clearly in fun. Not for her, the sing-song exercise sessions. Oh, mercy, no. She was far more chatty, too... far more engaged, generally, with the world around her. She kept talking about 'the river' and 'the pond', and I only learned later than she was referring to the Thames and - most likely - the water features at the last care home. In her younger days, she lived in Chiswick and Richmond, each within easy walking distance of a stretch of the Thames, and it seems this current place is situated in an area that's just leafy enough to remind her of her home in those days.
Alzheimer's is an amazing disease in many ways... while the brain is wasting away, it's also trying frantically to piece itself back together. Where fragments of memory get lost, it patches together similar situations and themes to create new - erroneous - memories and, all the while, struggles to fit them into the context of the here-and-now. This new place looks like it will be good for her, because she'll be more active - physically and mentally - and she is at least eating properly now, so the glitchy repair process will be more effective (if confusing for anyone else she talks to, who remembers the whole of the fragments she's piecing together). According to my mother, where she can't remember anything of a place or situation, she'll make something up entirely.
Whereas my last trip to see my grandmother was deeply unsettling, and left me feeling rather melancholy, this one left me rather more hopeful. As we left, I told her I'd see her again soon and, with a laugh, she said "If I'm all in one piece!"
Pretty sure she will be...
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