It’s really hard loving someone at a distance.
Rich flies off to New York tomorrow for a week and I will, as always really miss him. Not just the fact that there is space in the tooth mug in the bathroom, or no morning tea in my keep warm mug waiting for me on waking, but there will be a huge space in my life for five whole days.
Sure we’ll Skype and email. I will forward him his regular doses of East Enders, though after all the screaming in The Vic last week I really can’t imagine anyone would want to watch it, but I will miss him enormously.
After a busy Tuesday this week, with a couple of jobs dealt with despite the efforts of Bob Crowe and his cronies, I headed off to Yorkshire on Wednesday to spend a couple of days with my Mum.
Mum is 88 and is fiercely independent. She’s incredibly active. Recently she’s been forced to become more housebound due to a bad attack of sciatica. “It’ll go” she says, “we just have to wait”, though her patience with her own company is wearing thin.
Mum has a little terraced cottage in the village of Thrybergh where I was brought up. Until 1984 when my dad died, she ran the village shop, firstly with her parents, and then with my dad. She was the centre of village society. Nothing happened in Thrybergh without her knowing. The shop stood on the village green and overlooked the bus stop, so everyone or anyone leaving or arriving in the village was visible to the shop. Everyone knew Mum.
The shop is still there. It’s a mini market and I popped in to get some bread on Wednesday night as Mum hadn’t been able to get out and was running low. They don’t know who I am in the shop now, and its been bashed about. What was our living room and the centre of my life, is now the frozen food department. They’ve turned the ground floor of the house into more shop space and it always saddens me a little to step into it. It was a special world to a small boy having a shop, or two shops as it was then, to live in. Now it has a touch of the common and the run down about it. Give me Tesco’s any day.
I took Mum to have her eyes tested and get new glasses on Thursday. It was a bit of an expedition as she is finding walking hard at the moment and I could feel the pain she experienced in every step. Alas the one-way system that is Rotherham wouldn’t allow us near Specsavers in the car, so the walk had to be taken very slowly. Two pairs of rather designer glasses later and we were off back to the car.
We attended the AGM of Crossroads, Mum’s carers in the afternoon and at the tea party afterwards Mum was in her element. She started having an hours care a day first thing in the morning three years ago and all the girls or women who come on to see her love her. She sat at table and held court with a cup of tea and a custard cream and loved it. The girls loved her. They couldn’t wait to tell me how special she is. I know. I don’t always show it, but my mum is touched with magic.
I find it increasingly sad to say goodbye to her. Every day is a struggle, particularly at the moment and I just want to wave a wand and make everything easier for her. I leave and climb into the car wracked with guilt at he sight of her clutching her stick in the doorway of the house. I suspect that sometimes when I’ve gone, she sheds a tear. I know she has in the past.
Yet she will not move. Richard and I have discussed it and have offered her a place with us in the past but she will not move south. “I don’t want to spoil your lives “ she exclaims” and I don’t want to leave my life behind either” She’s right. What would living with us bring her? Long days of sitting in our flat in London, knowing no one. No visitors popping in. No church council to dominate when she can get out. No local hairdressers. It would be to take her life away from her.
And yet…I feel guilty. I feel I have failed that I can’t just throw enough money at the situation so she can have a carer all the time. Not that she needs one when she is on form.
She has regular visits from good strong friend. Friends such as Linda who lives a few hundred yards away and call s in every day. ~Sometimes Linda and John her husband, who are angels in human form, cook an extra meal and pop round to Mums with it plated under foil for her. She’s a good cook and cooks every day but doesn’t want to take on big meals just for one. I know that feeling only too well. I suspect while Rich is away this week there will be one night when I don’t feel like cooking anything.
Linda was there on Friday when The Fall happened. I rang home at 5pm to say I was off out for the evening, but got no reply. Strange and worrying. Mum isn’t out a lot at the moment and this was odd. I rang every twenty minutes or so as I drove over to good friends in Hammersmith. No answer but in my heart I knew something had happened. I could picture nay of several nightmare scenarios with her lying at the bottom of the stairs. She has a help call button, but is stubborn about wearing it all the time.
When I got to Hammersmith I rang Linda’s husband. Before I had finished explaining he told me she had had a fall and Linda was with her at the hospital. Mercifully she had fallen while Linda was with her. She had tripped on her stick and hit a cupboard. I spoke to Linda at the hospital and after three hours wait in casualty – Rotherham is no Holby! – Mum was home and rang me full of laughter. She had had three stitches in her cheek and was a bit bruised.
“I’m daft aren’t I” she said. She brushed of the whole incident with the same persistence that she brushes off any suggestions of help that she might need. The fight to get her to accept a carer. The persuasion needed to give her a hearing aid. She’s proud and I am proud of her. So proud. Perhaps I don’t always let her know.
Distance can be a difficult thing......and it’s not always measured in miles.
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