Living with a demented person is not always bad.
Every now and then there are small pockets of pleasantness — if not actual pleasure. (Perhaps I need to change the way I look at things.)
We are sitting on the front veranda on a Sunday afternoon. I am sipping my gin and water flavoured by a dollop of pomegranate syrup. It would have been a gin and tonic but Oma had filled up the tonic bottle with tap water. Pomegranate syrup is good in just about everything — thank you Middle Eastern people for inventing it.
Oma is drinking ginger tea and dreaming of Coca Cola. She doesn’t like alcohol, which she tried once. She doesn’t like ginger tea either.
I like to think that the street, with its houses cramped up against each other, reminds her of the village back home.
She is feeling chatty. I don’t know where Violet has got to, Oma muses, she said she was coming to visit me today.
I take a swig of gin. So who do you think I am, I ask. She looks at me. Oh, you must be Violet too, she says, before continuing from exactly where she was before I interrupted. My daughter Violet moved to Sydney but was supposed to be visiting me this afternoon, she says. Oh well!
The village-like ambience of the street must be working because she thinks I am one of her confidantes. And she is in the mood to share women’s stuff.
We only had two children, she says in a tone dripping with nostalgia, we would have liked to have had more but .....
Oh sh..t, she is going to tell me about her sex life.
Call me prudish, call me immature, but I don’t want to know. We’ve never been a progressive type of family and that sort of stuff never came up — although I had wondered once or twice how come that just about everyone we knew in the wog community had no more than two children. On the other hand, just about everyone among the Irish Catholics I went to school with had kids galore. What were they doing in those European villages that the Anglo/Celts weren’t doing — or the other way around?
She continues before I think of a way to change the subject.
It was my heart, she says in the kind of voice that speaks of unbearable sorrow, I didn’t have more children because of my heart problem. The doctors said I needed a new heart and I was in hospital for a long time until they found a new heart for me. Oh dear!
On one hand, I am relieved that she did not go to where I thought she was heading. On the other hand, I am frightened by her demented brain. She had regular heart bypass surgery about 10 years ago and her broken brain circuits have embellished the experience and incorporated it into an earlier narrative of her life. Once again I ask, who is she, and what is real.
Luckily, she is quick to change mood and subject.
There are so many cars in this street, she says, I have never seen so many cars. The fact that she has lived in car-populated Australia for more than 50 years is no longer a part of her memory — at least not today.
The animals should be coming home soon, she continues. What animals? The dog is on the couch as usual.
The pigs and the sheep that left home this morning to go to pasture, she says, looking at me as if I am stupid. I know what she is talking about as I have a memory of being bowled over by a rampaging sheep as a child. At that time the domestic herd animals were taken out daily to a back paddock to graze for the day. Everyone’s sheep ran out the front gate to follow the shepherd, the pigs went with the swine herd ..... etc. And they returned at dusk, each animal obviously knowing where it lived.
Jeezus, she is waiting for the bloody cows to come home.
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Does anyone have any advice on how to cope with a demented person?
