I’m watching as my mother stares intently through the window of her living room in Dudley. Her eyes fixed on something I can’t see, focused and alive in a world that I cannot exist. Wherever she is, though, I know that it isn’t here with me. Maybe she’s out there at sea? Out there on the ship which took her from Jamaica to Portsmouth all those years ago? Still a young woman, forever sailing in a world of fair seas and calm waters, where her father and brother are alive again, waiting for her by the dockside in Kingston to return home.
My mother doesn't know that she has dementia. Or that who she once was is being lost in a nebulous cloud of thoughts, memories and meanings. The axis of her world, which had made her everything that she was, has now shifted.
There’s just the belief, within her, that she’s run down, under the weather, and that she’ll get better soon. This feeling of fuzziness and ill health will pass, she tells me, as I smile and nod in agreement.
When I leave her, she thinks that I go to the house on the top of the hill behind her home. Before she goes upstairs to bed, before she leaves my dad downstairs, as his paralysis means he can't accompany her to their old bedroom, at that moment when she draws his blinds closed, she looks up at the house and wonders if I’m home.
But I’m glad.
I'm glad that she doesn't know her diagnosis of vascular dementia, or that she’s at stage 6 out of 7 stages, with the final stage soon to come. I’m just so glad that she thinks that I’m always close by, out there up on that hill, behind her home, when she looks up to see if my lights are on at night, wondering whether I’m at home, or out at sea, where those who are missing or lost to her can always be found.