I Love the Bones of You

by Christopher Eccleston;

  I would sit with him in recovery, my job being to make sure he didn’t pull his catheter out. He had dementia, but he also had an almost allergic reaction to the anaesthetic. It scrambles everybody to some degree, but especially so if you have dementia, and he was in an abject state of physical and mental confusion. It was an incredibly difficult period, so much so that Mum stopped being able to go to the hospital. Dad turned on her, giving her a hard time, as if she was somehow to blame for his predicament. It was just too much for a wife and mother who was already physically and psychologically exhausted. She didn’t miss many visits, but me and my brothers would always make sure one of us went so she knew he had somebody there. He’d have sat by that bed for us. No better man to have in your corner than my dad.

  As well as preventing him tugging on his catheter, I felt my visits were there to protect his dignity. He had pyjamas on, but his constant movement, some innate recognition of a foreign body, the catheter, being inside him, meant he was pulling at them, exposing himself without knowing it. I’d seen his penis about twice in my life and now suddenly it was there. Somewhere inside me, while I was acutely aware of my dad’s condition, where so much similitude to the father I once knew had been ripped away and tossed aside, was the son who recognised that to see his father’s penis was at odds with every ingrained element of that relationship. Again, an emphasis on how far we had travelled. A man with such pride. The operation hadn’t killed him, but surely, had he been aware of it, the thought that his son was now seeing him in a way that, in any semblance of normal life, he never should, would have been the final blow. All that was going round in my head as I desperately attempted to avert his hands, tried to stop him inflicting pain and damage on himself.

  He’s shown me what it is to live, I thought, and now he’s showing me what it is to die. That may sound pretentious, I don’t know, but as I looked at him I couldn’t help but think, You taught me how to kick a ball. You taught me how to be, how not to be, and now you are showing me what it’s like to die.

  He was thrashing around. ‘Dad, Dad, please stop this, Dad. Will you please stop doing this?’

  He did just that and stared at my face – ‘You look just like my father.’ I was taken aback. He was suddenly lucid.

  ‘I look like your father,’ I told him, ‘because I’m your son, and I love you.’

  I kissed him.

  ‘Ooh!’ he went, and smacked his lips. Even in his dementia, he had to make out like I was being queer.

  It was one of the most vivid moments of my life, so much emotion instilled in it. It also made me think of his father, a hard man, fierce, like him. The bone structure, the big nose, the piercing eyes. At that minute, all three of us were in that room. It felt like any of us could have been in each other’s position.

  Dad, for certain, had seen this set-up from a different angle. His father had a tumour on the brain and my dad’s belief was that doctors had experimented on him with LSD. In the end, he went what was described simply as ‘mad’. Whether it was dementia, I don’t know – conditions weren’t termed the same as they are now – but the symptoms sound rather too similar for it not to have been. At night, his sons would take turns in heading round to their mum’s house to help her look after him. One night he pulled the wardrobe over on himself because he believed there were things, alive, coming out of it.

  Nana and Grandad Pop had moved from a family house on Summerville Road in Salford to a smaller house on Tenby Drive, from where they could see their old house. The move, understandably, had caused some confusion with Grandad Pop. ‘I don’t live here, this isn’t my house,’ Grandad was telling my dad, which prompted Ronnie to take him for a walk.

  ‘I took him out the house,’ he told me, ‘walked him down to the bottom of the road, crossed over, walked back up, and went back in.’

  Granddad Pop looked at him. ‘You think I’m bloody stupid, don’t you?’

  Dementia is all over Dad’s side of the family. He had seen his mother go the same way. Among other signs, she’d started accusing my Auntie Amy of stealing from her. He’d seen that happen to his mother but would never talk about it. To talk, as we know, was bred out of him. The descent into dementia happened also to one of his brothers and his sister. None of these occurrences was ever described as ‘dementia’. People in those days – and we’re talking as recently as the ’80s and ’90s here – went ‘doolally’. People would say, ‘Oh, he’s got old’, or use the term ‘senile’.

  Eventually, the time came when I stopped calling him ‘Dad’. I had to. There’d been an incident while we were on holiday. It was very, very frightening.

  I’d rented a cottage in Cornwall with my girlfriend and invited my mum and dad to stay. Initially, all was fine. As ever, me and Dad spent a lot of time doing the crossword, with the paper laid out on the kitchen table. ‘Dictator’ was the clue. Six letters.

  ‘Despot,’ said my dad.

  ‘Cop for that!’ I cried – we had phrases we always used when doing crosswords. I was so happy. I was spending time with Dad, Mum was having a holiday, everyone was relaxing. And then I could feel him looking at me. Feel him, right there, inches from my face, staring, his eyes boring into me.

  ‘Are you related to me?’

  I looked at him. ‘Yes, Dad, I’m your son.’ There was a little bit of contained anger in my voice. How could he not know who I was?

  I repeated, ‘I’m your son.’

  And it just went off.

  ‘Does she know that?’ He was agitated, gesturing towards my mum sat in the other room. ‘Does she know you’re my son?’

  ‘Yes. That’s my mum.’

  We walked into the other room. He pointed at me. ‘He’s just told me that he’s my son.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said my mum, ‘that’s Chris. He is your son.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know anything about that.’ He was shouting now. ‘I don’t know bloody anything about a son.’

  It escalated, until Dad was consumed with a truly desperate rage. Somehow, my mum managed to shepherd him upstairs into their bedroom. I couldn’t help – the mere sight of me was enough to send him into full-on hysteria.

  Me and my girlfriend got out of the way and went to our bedroom. All we could hear was Dad shouting. ‘He says he’s my son. I haven’t got a son. I don’t know who he is.’ He was going and going and going. In his head, when I’d said, ‘I’m your son,’ I was telling him he had a child that his wife didn’t know about. His illegitimate offspring had appeared out of nowhere. Effectively, the way he saw it, he’d been caught out playing away. He thought he was in trouble. He’d been emotionally reliant on my mum throughout their marriage, which had morphed into her becoming his carer, and now he thought he’d been fingered for a past indiscretion.

  It was the middle of the night and we were in the middle of nowhere. As I lay there, I had no inkling what might happen. I didn’t know whether he was going to become violent, walk out of the cottage, challenge me, my girlfriend, anything. We were all adults with him in that house and yet we were all scared, because the other side of Ronnie is that thing I do on screen. Volcano.

  ‘This is all my fault,’ I kept saying over and over. I’d made a mistake in taking him to Cornwall. He wasn’t in his own environment, there was nothing familiar, and then here was this guy, very like him physically, telling him he’s his son, using all his language – ‘What a player! Cop for that!’ He was confused. Mentally, it had thrown him. ‘I used to do a crossword with . . . I did it with . . . who’s this? . . . I don’t know who this is.’ The distress in my father was incredible. And that came from him not knowing such an obvious thing. ‘Son? Son?’ That surely then leads to a question he didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t vocalise. ‘Who am I? WHO AM I?’

  The bald truth of the matter descended on me. My dad does not know who I am. I am Chris, his son, and he thinks I’m a stranger. And that was it. End of. I never ever went down that route again. Because it’s not about me, is it? It’s at th
at point you start dealing with the dementia rather than the person. An insistence in carrying on the old way – ‘Dad’, ‘son’ – would distress him and endanger my mother.

  Next day, Dad had the emotional residue of the strain and the rage. He was confused and pale. The rest of us were shaken and everything felt eggshell fragile. I felt ashamed of myself for my clumsiness in taking him to Cornwall. I was also questioning the neediness in me that, when he had asked who I was, meant I’d not stopped and thought about the situation, but, without hesitation, blurted out, ‘I’m your son.’

  I realised it had taken me five years to stop hoping the dad of now was the dad of then. I couldn’t talk to him about it, so I would have to have a conversation with myself instead. ‘Forget it, pal. Store all that up, love all that about him, but deal with the now.’

  I was slow to make that realisation, hence my desperation for him to recognise me as his son. I’m sure that’s a common error. My wake-up call was that day in the cottage. That, you could say, was my Damascene moment.

  At home, we’d learnt how powerful music was in calming Dad, how deeply soothed he was by it. In the ’60s, Frank Sinatra had filmed a series of concerts that had been released under the title A Man and His Music. He recorded a number of performances in the collection, but there was one that my dad watched on a loop. Mum would put it on so she could get on with her housework. If I was round, Dad and I would sing the songs together – ‘Nancy (with the Laughing Face)’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, all sorts. For a long time, Dad remembered the lyrics, then they went and he’d sing the tune instead, slightly behind, but still there. Music had always been massive for my dad and continued to be so well into his dementia.

  But Mum needed a break, and occasionally the three of us would go to the Trafford Centre and I’d take Dad off to Starbucks.

  ‘Go on, Mum. Go and have a mooch on your own.’

  I’d turn to my dad. ‘Shall we go and have a coffee, pal?’ In his mind, I was a friend, someone he’d just met perhaps, so I’d call him ‘pal’ or ‘mate’.

  He still recognised my mum as Elsie, though. She was the last person he forgot.

  ‘Where’s Elsie going?’

  ‘Just to get a few bits. Come on, let’s go and have a coffee.’ Father and son but not father and son.

  Dad would always have a latte and the conversation was just as familiar. I’d remind him of himself, his history, his life, and then he’d start to talk. As he spoke, he’d get comfortable, because he had something to offer, he was part of the moment. He’d talk and talk, and then he’d say, ‘How do you know all this? How do you know all this about me?’

  ‘Well, I’ve known you a long time, pal. I’m your friend. I know Elsie, and I know you’ve got two sons, twins, Alan and Keith.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘And you’ve got another son, haven’t you? He’s the actor.’

  ‘Yes, he’s an actor. He does a bit of acting.’

  There’s a dark humour to this. I recognise that.

  Occasionally someone would come up to me. ‘Excuse me, sorry to bother you, can I have an autograph?’

  ‘OK, no problem.’

  My dad would sit there watching. There’d be a flicker of recognition at this unfolding scene.

  Occasionally, I’d change things round by telling him what I did.

  ‘Oh, you’re an actor, are you? You do a bit of that, do you?’

  I’d drag up his old saying from the play he’d done at Whiteacre.

  ‘Cor, stone the crows, if it ain’t Charlie. Move another inch and I’ll blow your bleeding head orf.’

  He’d start laughing. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘It’s one of yours. You did a bit of acting, didn’t you, at Whiteacre?’

  ‘Oh, I did, yeah. I was very happy at Whiteacre, you know.’

  ‘What was the headmaster’s name?’

  ‘Mr Targett.’

  ‘Mr Targett, that’s right. And what was the name of your dormitory?’

  Give it time and it would come.

  Occasionally, I’d see anxiety in his eyes, a discomfort with this stranger talking to him, or the unfamiliarity of the surroundings, in which case I’d draw on speeches from Shakespeare:

  To be, or not to be, that is the question:

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

  No more.

  He’d listen, agog. The words would settle with him for a few seconds.

  ‘Bloody hell! Where’ve you had that from?’

  ‘It’s Hamlet.’

  ‘Bloody good that. How do you remember all that?’ He was amused, intrigued.

  By that point, I’d made my peace with being anonymous to Dad. It might not have been perfect but, like the boy in the cinema watching spaghetti westerns all those years previously, I was just enjoying the closeness I’d always wanted. More than anything, I enjoyed it because I felt I was giving my mum a break, and I knew she needed one. My brothers would do the same. When I was with Dad, I was doing it for them and my mum, and whenever they were with my dad, they were doing it for us two. All three of us were so versed in Dad’s history that we knew how to hand it back to him and make him come alive.

  I’m not saying it was easy to interact with Dad on the basis of being unknown to him. How can that scenario ever lack a certain amount of pain? But, as awful, as gut-wrenching, as devastating as it was, we all came to understand that for us to have a relationship with him, we had to stop looking for recognition as ourselves. There’s only one real path towards acceptance of dementia – take your ego out of it. Once you’ve done that, it’s fine, because you can still love the person who’s there.

  That reconciliation with the situation, though, was ours, not his. Issues could still blow up from nowhere. There were times when he definitely saw me, this person who he didn’t know, as a threat. Occasionally, I could feel his anger if I was driving him and Mum somewhere. Who was this stranger driving Elsie around? He drove Elsie around, that was his job.

  Other times in the car he’d suddenly panic. ‘I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where this place is.’

  ‘It’s OK, pal, I do,’ I’d calm him, and eventually he’d quieten down. He needed someone to be firm, to ease his frantic mind.

  He developed a nervous tick where he’d slap his legs – rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat – tat, tat. He’d never done it before dementia. It came, I think, when he had an intrusive thought – ‘Who is this bloke driving me?’ – physicalising it, an internal and unwitting coping strategy perhaps.

  I would be reminded as he sat in the passenger seat how, when I was younger, and the roles were reversed, he would give my knee a squeeze as he changed gear. He did that from when I was three right up to my mid-thirties. Without thinking, one day, as I was driving him, I did the same back to him. He turned and looked at me, properly staring me down, as if I’d done something a bit queer, overstepped his boundaries. It was awful. He did that because he was frightened. The same man who had frightened me was now frightened himself because I had squeezed his knee.

  That same perception of me as a threat also saw him practically kick me out of the house on Christmas Day. We’d had Christmas dinner, after which, traditionally, Dad had always washed the pots, his contribution to the day. As the dementia took hold, however, he’d done less and less around the house, and so I went into the kitchen to do the washing-up instead. He followed me. I tried not to make eye contact, but I knew he was staring at me. He walked out. I could hear him having a word with my mum. Then back in. Looking at me, a dirty look, trying to intimidate me. I knew I had to say something.

  ‘Are you OK, pal?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I’m all right. I’m OK.’ The emphasis was very much on the ‘I’m’.

  He went back into the front room. I
gave it a second and followed. Mum was sat there looking uncomfortable.

  There was only one thing for it.

  ‘Right, I’d better get going then.’

  I put my coat on – ‘See you both soon’ – and left. He didn’t want a stranger in the house; it was winding him up. The best way to deflate that situation was for me to leave, and that’s exactly what I did.

  I rang Mum the minute I got home. She got very upset, angry even, about Dad’s behaviour. ‘I’m annoyed with him,’ she said. ‘How could he kick his own son out the house on Christmas Day?’

  ‘Mum,’ I told her, ‘Dad didn’t kick me out the house. Dementia kicked me out the house.’

  She knew that really. Kicking his son out was the last thing he would do.

  Thankfully, there were other Christmases that delivered memories I treasure still. One year I got us a bottle of Amarone to have with our Christmas dinner. I poured three big glasses. Me and my mum sipped ours. My dad still hadn’t touched his by the time he’d polished off his dinner.

  ‘Ronnie,’ my mum said, ‘you haven’t gone near your wine.’ Ronnie was more of a beer man. He picked up that Amarone and sank it like a pint. That manifested itself a little later when the three of us ended up in the middle of the living room dancing to ‘Saturday Night at the Movies’ by The Drifters.

  ‘Come on,’ me and my mum were urging him, ‘it’s Christmas Day, we can still have a laugh.’ He was very childlike, he was very happy. It was a lovely ray of sunshine through the gathering greyness.

  Dad’s reduced world was ever shrinking, and the evidence was visible not just in his relationship with his family but also in more everyday ways. This man who once had been so selective about the television he watched had now become someone who had it on all the time. He would sit in front of anything. Sometimes the TV took on an entirely new dimension. He really liked the sitcom Miranda, for instance, the reason being Miranda Hart talked direct to camera. My dad would talk back, agreeing with her – ‘Yeah, yeah, oh yeah’ – laughing. He thought she was in the room conversing with him. I nearly met her once and was disappointed when the chance disappeared. I wanted to let her know about my dad, because I suspect she was, without knowing it, connecting with a lot of people with dementia. There was almost a joy in seeing that relationship. It offset the more disturbing moments, like watching him scratch away at the carpet with his fingernails.