A Conversation About Aging

Yesterday was Victoria Day in Canada. The unofficial tip of the hat to the beginning of summer. Otherwise know as “The May Long.” And for the first time this year, my mum and I got out for something other than an appointment to go to her doctor or to have her hair done. We drove to the nearby Kildonan Park, got out the push chair, and enjoyed a couple of hours outdoors. The weather was splendid, with just enough of a cool breeze to take the edge off the heat. We took a break for coffee between our rambles. The park was packed with people, there were ducks and geese in and around the water, lots of trees and shrubs, and a mostly clear sky above our heads. The outing worked wonders for my mother. Well into the evening she kept saying what a wonderful day it had been. Her eyes were bright and her mind was sharp. It nevertheless caught up to her a bit and she had a bit of nap before supper. But so did I, to be honest.

Victoria Day is public holiday celebrated on the last Monday preceding May 25 to honour Queen Victoria.

The reign of Victoria is, of course, known for its Victorian codes of conduct. Something which, I’m sure, was far from my mother’s mind, when as a teenager, she adopted the name “Vicci,” while her friend took on the name “Dusty.” They were a pair, as about as far away from the strictures of Victorian England as you could imagine. Two English girls footloose and fancy free. Left school when they were fourteen, ran away from home to work in a chocolate factory in another city, came back, then left to work in a fish and chips restaurant in a seaside town. This was during World War Two, though to hear my mother’s tales the war had little effect on her spirits. (All of her brothers who went off to war returned.) Her most vivid memories of the war were seeing the bombs being dropped in nearby Hull, which was an important sea port at the time, plus sleeping in a bomb shelter with he sister Billie in the backyard, or garden as the Brits call it.

Back at home, my grandmother put certain restrictions on my mum. She and her friend Dusty loved to go to the dances where all the big bands of the era played, but my grandmother had a rule: one dance a month. A month?! Tears of anguish.

After the war ended in 1945, my mother and Dusty were given a freer reign. They often caught a train to cities like Doncaster or Leeds to take in the bands and dance the night away.

To cut a long story short, the Oscar Rabin Band was playing at one of these dances, and the gentleman who would later become my dad, took a fancy to my mum. He was one of the trumpet players in the band and from the stage must have seen her dancing. She often tells me now she can’t imagine why he took an interest in her. But he did. They were married, though not without my grandma checking out the man and his family. Marrying a musician was a foreign concept to the rest of the family, bringing up thoughts of drinking, drugs, and loose women, which was about as far from the truth as you could get. But with my grandma’s approval, they did get married. A year or so later, the announcement was made on BBC Radio that “Bobby Benstead has a new Benstead on the bedstead, and he’ll be jet-propelled out of the studio with ‘I’ll Be Around,” for which he performed the trumpet solo to close the broadcast.

How’s that for an entrance?

So these and many other things are what we talk about: the past, what she remembers, though she may get the dates mixed up. Vicci (born Cecily Heather and nicknamed Bubbles by the family), the jump jazz queen of her youth, a woman with a zest for life that still sparkles today, especially when we can get out when the weather is good and we can explore our little corner of the world.

Hello. First let me correct a mistake I made in my last post. I met my mother and stepfather in Toronto in 2008, not the early 1990s. What was I thinking? That’s just about 20 years off the mark!

But now for: “I’m not myself.” My mother said that to me yesterday, and it summed up much of what we’ve been going through this past while. She recognizes that she is not herself from time to time. It’s like a spell which she comes out of. And she recognizes it as such. From the dream-like state in which she went wandering, or when slips away for a while and suddenly asks me “What day is it?” (I can now point to our daily info board.) I’m-not-myself is a state in which she seems to drift away for a while, though it is most noticeable when she wakes up in the morning and whatever dream she may be having continues until we can talk long enough to bring her back to some simple facts: where we live, the time, the day and date. It a bit of a revelation for me. It helps me understand her, and what she is dealing with. Not being herself is a state she wants to avoid.

“What is the good of your stars and trees, your sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into our daily lives?” – E. M. Forster

In the middle of January this year, 2023, my mother took a wander. The only hint I had that she might be inclined to walk out unannounced had taken place the previous fall, and it was short adventure. It took place in the middle of the day, and I caught before she had taken more than a few steps into the hallway where she was about to knock on our neighbour’s door. She was confused but did not struggle against my efforts to bring her back into our own condo unit.

The January event, however, was much more disturbing. I heard her get up around 5:45 a.m. to use the toilet. I thought she had gone back to bed, but when I got up about half an hour later she was gone. Panic!

We have three floors in our building, and we are on the top floor. I went up and down all three floors and could not find her. Terrified that she had gone outside, I put on my parka and went around our building twice to no avail. It was minus 16 degrees C. and if she had gone out in her pyjamas the entry door would have locked behind her. I didn’t have much time.

The only odd thing I noticed was that a paramedics truck from the fire department was parked outside, but I couldn’t think how that would have anything to do with my mother, but it did.

Not knowing that, I ran back upstairs to our unit to call the police. Just as I got in the door, my cell phone rang. It was someone from Victoria Lifeline calling. Although this made no sense to me, I told them my mother was missing and I didn’t know what to do. I was getting ready to go outside again when they called back and said the paramedics were already on site. Just as I hung up, I opened our door to find two paramedics on their way up the stairs. They had found my mother’s Victoria Lifeline button and pressed it, which apparently gives the the police the address of the wearer.

I was sooner reunited with my mother. She had been wandering the building knocking on doors, until she was finally taken in by two of our most generous and wonderful neighbours on the main floor.

Speaking to her later, she said she remembered trying to get out. She said she wanted to go downstairs (I imagine she was thinking of the house where she used to live) and help arrange some kind of event or game, maybe a party, with friends. But she also claimed she had been out walking up and down the streets for hours and had just arrived home. This was still pretty early in the morning, and after talking for a while she went back to bed. When I went to see if she was sleeping a little while later, she was surprised to see me, thinking I was at work, whereas I had been retired for almost three years and am almost always at home with her, unless I have to go out for essentials, such as grocery shopping and what not.

The whole event shook her up, but in a way it all turned out for the best. The paramedics were super helpful. They talked to us for a long time about dementia, and put in calls for us to get us connected with resources and organizations that could help us.

I can’t tell you how reassuring this was. I immediately felt a great weight lifted from my shoulders. The follow-ups happened quite quickly. She was tested by someone from the Geriatrics Outreach Services (my mother passed, but barely) and offered all sorts of suggestions. Some we had already set up, such as putting a small lock at the top of the door where my mother could not reach it, setting up a barrier which she would have to remove if she were trying to get out, plus my own idea of putting a small aluminum bowl over the deadbolt which would force her to think about what she was attempting to do. So far all this measures have worked. For instance, in a later attempt to get out, she rattled the metal clotheshorse which we use as a barrier. It was the middle of the night, but it woke me up and I was able to go up to her and say, “Where you going, Mum?” It’s like she wakes up from a dream. She said, “I don’t know.” I made her a cup of tea and we talked for awhile before she went back to sleep.

If she recalls these episodes at all, it is for a very short time. Yet, she understands the precautions which surround the door, and she approves. She wants them in place. She doesn’t want to wander, and I think that’s more than half the battle.

“Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.” – Aldous Huxley

Let’s start with my mum’s second husband, Taras. As I have mentioned, he passed away in January 2020 at Luther Home from heart failure. Even while we were waiting in Emergency for her tests results in the hope of finding out what was causing her odd behaviour, she continually asked where Taras was. By then he had been dead for over a year, and desperate not to upset her, I made excuses for his absence. Only when we arrived home later that evening did I sit her down to tell her the truth of his passing, a truth which she seemed to suddenly recall.

Beyond that, however, she could not remember a single thing about their married life. Just a little bit about the beginning and a little bit about the end. The small stroke, which was the diagnosis which we had received from the doctor at the hospital, had wiped out almost all her memories about Taras, and many more. And so began the long process of trying to bring those memories back, starting with her memories of Taras. We talked, we went through photographs, but apart from a few key moments, nothing surfaced. She recalled details from their wedding day and she recalled how they met, but that was about it, despite the fact that they had spent over forty years together. That’s a large part of her life, and to look back and see only emptiness was a frightening dose of her new reality. He was a marvelous man and one of the best things to have happened to her, but she could not remember their life together, not their many trips to England where Taras was a big hit with my mother’s family, not even sitting at the dinner table across from him at home, all of that was gone. I’m no expert in these things, but it occurred to me that the troubles she was having with her memories were associated with the most meaningful people in her life. Was it too painful to remember or had the stroke physically destroyed those memories? Was it psychological or physical? I don’t know, but it has become the reality we have had to live with.

Some of the few memories she has around the time she and Taras met struck me as odd. She seemed to think he was some kind of underworld figure connected to gambling, and that he was a heavy drinker. None of which were true, and although she admits that now, it seems to be her first impression of him. Then the lights go dim, and only when I can point to a particular memory of him from my own experience, does she recall the episode. But these moments are few and far between, and we soon return to the no man’s land of forgetfulness. She has come to believe he was a good man, but it’s a perception drawn mostly from what I and her friends tell her.

It’s a tragedy really. To lose the best parts of your life and not know what you have lost. Or it that the reason to forget?

Her first husband, my dad, Bob or Bobby Benstead, is a more distant memory, one from her younger days. She was married when she was twenty, and has many solid memories of her life as a girl and then as a teenager, all the way up to her marriage to my dad and beyond. Much of this she retains, but not everything. But here, at least, I can jump in with a timeline which I have accumulated over the years from what my mother has told before her memory started to fade and from what I recall growing up which we can follow through from their marriage in 1950 to when my father died in 1960.

I thought I had a a notion of the circumstances surrounding his death, but lately my mother’s explanation is at odds with mine and it has left me wondering if she is right or is her memory failing her. Because the cause of death has very different meanings for her and for me.

And then there’s the mystery husband, the one between my dad and Taras. A ghost to which she cannot put an identity, a phantom of her imagination that leaves her searching for answers which do not exist.

And so we live in the rickety scaffolding of today amidst the uncertainty of the past.

More about my dad next time.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” – Reinhold Niebuhr