Sometimes, like now, today, and let's be honest, yesterday and the day before that, it is hard to see how one might possibly get through the next hour, let alone the whole day, let alone looking forward and wondering if this will infact go on and on until there is literally nothing to save.  Mum's increasing fraility of mind and body somehow only highlights my own.  We are both caught  in the same cast iron Little Nipper spring trap and I am sometimes moments away from chewing through my own leg in order to crawl away to die in the undergrowth.

The Diary of Dementia lurches on, each day is exactly 24 hours long.  Usually as humans we divide up those 24 hours into some rough pattern, block out bits in highlighted colours, hang on solid decorations to represent the various O'Clocks through which we pass the time.  Getting up O'Clock, Breakfast O'Clock, Crossword o'Clock, etcetera  The Dementia O'Clock has no recognisable features with which to map out the passing of abstract concepts like time.  There is no 'night time' no 'bedtime' no 'dinnertime'.  There is only lots of unfilled bits of space / time continuum which at any nanosecond could morph into something random.  Conversation becomes fraught with danger for at any moment the subject matter could slide alarmingly into uncharted, unknown territory.  Just now, mum zimmered after me when I went to the loo, she is always worried if I am not in her direct eyeline, so gets an enormous amount of exercise in by following me around the Bungalow,  in fact her pathological attachment to my movements makes an umbilical cord seem free range.  "Are you alright ?" I say, as she blocks yet another doorway and traps me yet again in an even smaller area of The Bungalow, "Is that Bugger still here?!" she says, "What Bugger?" I ask, "That Bugger that I married" she practically spits, "Harry?" (my late father the only person she was ever married to) I ask, "no, not him that other bugger!" she says....

"No, it's just you and me here" I say.  She sighs with what I suppose is relief but could just as easily be pure exhaustion.  "Can I go to bed?" she breathes, the effort of asking  now seems too much for her and she sways dramatically on her zimmerframe as if to emphasise her perilous situation.  

So we begin the task that is repeated with tedious monotony throughout the aforementioned 24 hours, getting undressed and into her nightie, refilling her hot water bottle, washing and changing her pads and looking for a cat that might (probably not) be persuaded to sit on her bed for an hour or so before she decides to get up again, and want to get dressed, and have a decaffinated coffee and a jam sandwich or ask for a book to read, and so on and so forth, throughout the day and night. 

Thankfully, I have a half bottle of wine and some soda water with which to punctuate the next hour or so, I am quieter than a mouse as I prise open the fridge door and stuff some olives and cheese into my mouth while I pour the wine and then roll a ciggie to tell my mind and body that this is an official "rest me-time O'Clock".  As always, I wonder how long either of us can carry on like this and when I have exhausted all the possible alternatives and discarded all the options, I will look at the increasinly baffling crossword yet again.

I would like to turn on the television but the cost of waking mum up and her coming back out of bed and wanting to repeat all thre stages yet again is too high.  

I turned 60 in March, she will be 90 in July.  I cannot predecease her by choice.  I can do nothing but carry on.  It is hard.