So why are you going to hospital at this time of night, the taxi driver asks. Are you sick?
He probably would not have asked questions if I had not sat in the front seat. Anyhow, being a relatively polite person, I tell him I am going to the RPA to pick up my mother who has run away from home.
It had been a bit of a shock to come home and find her gone.
It b as a standard Wednesday. Hurry home from work; yell at the demented one for locking the dog out in the rain; dish up some spag bol; fish out the day’s pills from the Webster pack and tell her I’m going to trivia but won’t be late.
Steak, several glasses of cab sav and a sad result at trivia after betting all on the jeopardy question about movies — no one had any idea in what fictional country The Grand Budapest Hotel is set in but it definitely isn’t Hungary — and home not long after 10pm.
Sitting all by herself in the sitting room, Dog looks as if she is trying to tell me something. It sounds like ‘she’s gone home, yippee’. (Their relationship has never been good.)
It does not take long to work out that Oma is not in the house. The fact that the suitcase she keeps packed and ready in anticipation of going ‘‘home’’ is no longer in her bedroom, is a dead giveaway.
Beating back frightening thoughts of demented old ladies who disappear, never to be seen again, I ring triple 0.
Just as I am reaching for the wine bottle to cheer myself up while waiting for the police, the phone rings.
A nice young constable tells me Oma is safe. Someone noticed an old lady with a heavy suitcase wondering around the car park of a nearby shopping complex and called the police. As she still had identification details from her Wodonga home where no one answered the phone, and probably insisted she lived in Croatia, the police did not know what to do with her, so they took her to hospital.
Hence the cab ride with this young Indian who keeps asking questions.
Dementia, he says. Dementia. We don’t have that sort of problem in my country. Do you want to know why?
It is because you eat a lot of tumeric, I say.
On good advice from a friend who has seen an article somewhere about how this spice prevents dementia, I have been feeding Oma a daily dose of tumeric in coconut oil — the oil supposedly another magic tonic to get the brain firing. (I haven’t seen any improvement so far but live in hope.)
The driver scoffs at the tumeric.
Our people don’t get dementia because our old people are not lonely, he says. I bet your mother has lived on her own and been very lonely.
Our old people are an important part of the family — they are never left alone. He gives me lovely examples of his own grandmother being needed and surrounded by family love.
It is true, Oma has lived on her own since the old man died almost two decades ago.
As I climb out of the cab, the driver gives me advice. You have to make her feel important; tell her you love that she is living with you, and she will be much better within six months.
In an emergency ward cubicle Oma is enjoying a cheese sandwich and seems totally oblivious to the panic she has caused.
Do you want some of this sandwich, she asks.
I must remember to make her feel important.
