The Life of a Dementia Carer

A few months before leaving London I joined a Monday evening meditation group for gay men near Trafalgar Square. It was a lovely, welcoming space. One evening I got chatting during tea break to an older man. I told him I was moving back to Brazil soon to take care of my mom. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I once did the same for mine.’

‘How long did you live with her?’

‘Ten years. I was very good at taking care of her,’ he said prophetically.

It’s been now over a year since I’ve returned to Brazil to be my mom’s carer and help my brother run our family’s guesthouse. Mom has been easy to take care of; she does most things by herself. Her main struggle is remembering short-term things but her old memories are fairly intact. The main skill for caring for someone with dementia is patience. Patience with getting them through daily tasks; patience with the same questions every day, every hour; patience with them getting up throughout the night and telling you “don’t worry, it’s just me”. Every day you are reminded that this person needs your help and support in ways that you would otherwise take for granted.

I have vivid memories of my “previous life” in London. Recently, I was lying in the hammock after lunch (where I rest for an hour) when suddenly I saw myself on the Overground train. I saw the commuters around me, I saw myself taking the stairs down Camden Road and joining the throng heading for work. It dawned on me that when my mom repeats one of her memories (usually from her childhood) that’s what she’s also experiencing: she talks as if she’s back there, and it always ends with a sigh and a lament for happier times.

My mom doesn’t miss the memories she has lost; people like me are here to remind her what she has forgotten. She takes in that knowledge with some surprise then promptly forgets it. She lives in a world where she can’t remember anymore her sons’ birthdays, her favourite books or films. I once asked her what it was like and she said it was as if her life was a movie, where a piece of the reel had been snipped off and the remaining bits glued back together. She experiences the jump cut in her movie, the confusion of suddenly going from one scene to the next, but never knows what has been removed.

In 2014, when we first suspected she had Alzheimer’s, when I returned to Brazil for a year to help her get diagnosed and to save the guesthouse, I wasn’t happy. But today… I can say I am happy. Right in the middle of a pandemic, isolated in the Brazilian countryside, away from friends, with our family business temporarily shut down again. But, most importantly of all, I believe my mom is happier too – despite daily complaints (which I take to be normal ones for an elderly person).

Book review: Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut Jr

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I’ve discovered in my old age that I don’t like zany humour.

I first read “Cat’s Cradle” in university. It was one of those novels that other students knew, and that everyone loved. Over the years, the only thing that stayed with me was the religion of Bokononism, founded by Bokonon (an old black calypso singer) on the Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, and some of its zany (which I thought at the time “smart”) concepts: that we all belong to karasses (groups of random people that are here on the planet for a particular reason which they are not aware of), that life is ironic and absurd, that we are always a step away from utter destruction. That was the 90s, the fall of the Berlin Wall felt like yesterday, and some of “Cat’s Cradle’s” themes still seemed current. But now… in a world as crazy and surreal as ours, Vonnegut’s satire seems quaint and even soft.

The novel is narrated by Jonah, before his conversion to Bokononism, and charts his adventures in the pursuit of writing a book about the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan. (Kurt Vonnegut was a soldier during WWII and survived the bombing of Dresden by the Allied forces – his war experience stayed with him and affects most of his work, from what I understand.)

Jonah ends up meeting the three children of the man who invented the bomb, and finally lands in San Lorenzo, where things become even more zany – involving a dictator, Bokonon and a new weapon of mass destruction called ice9.

Chapters are short, characters talk a lot about things that are meant to be funny but ring flat, subplots unfold within subplots then disappear altogether. Something about the Cold War, something about humanity being prone to self-destruction, something about the futility of love.

Margaret Atwood’s “The Year of the Flood”, which also features songs from a new post-apocalyptic religion, may have been influenced by “Cat’s Cradle”. I think Atwood’s black humour can be very Vonnegut, but more current.

Kurt Vonnegut once said: “here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” Well, I found at least two of them in this novel.


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