Before I took to closing the door, I often woke in fright because there was someone in the doorway.
What do you want, I would say with the usual annoyance you expect to feel when woken too early by a demented woman.
Oma would be standing there, fully dressed down to her hand-knitted cardigan with the Sturt Desert peas over her floral apron and clutching what I call her imitation Princes Grace handbag because it is so 1950s.
Let’s go home now, she would say. I would try not to get mad. It’s too early to go anywhere, so you better get back to bed, I would say.
She would trot off but I would hear her her thumping about in the next room.
When I finally got up about 6.30am, she would be sitting on the kitchen/dining room couch still clutching the same handbag but with her suitcase by her side. She looked as if she was waiting for a bus. I am packed and ready to go, she would say.
Now that I keep the bedroom door shut, I don’t wake in fright, but the going home scene still happens, albeit a little later in the morning.
Every day Oma wants to go home. Every day her suitcase is packed and ready, regardless how often I unpack it with the idea of making her feel at home.
Am I keeping her against her will? Nah! She doesn’t want to go to Wodonga, even when I try to manipulate her into saying so. I try to manipulate her into returning to her Wodonga house because then she would become someone else’s problem. (I never said I was a nice person.)
Regardless how much I prompt her, she cannot remember the house where she has lived in for more than 50 years and vacated about two months ago.
She wants to go to her village house in Croatia; never mind that she has not been there for more than 50 years. Every day we go through what now seems like a word game, its variation subject to mood — hers and mine.
I’m going home today, she announces, before biting into her cheese on toast. My people are coming to pick me up.
Oh yes, I say without looking up from my newspaper, and who are your people?
My parents, of course, they are coming today.
Still refusing to accept that Oma is definitely crazy, I fight for what I call reality. It calls for brutality.
Your parents have been dead for 40 years, so they are unlikely to come today, I snap. They are buried in Wodonga — you must remember how we visited their graves and you took plastic flowers. (Oma loves plastic flowers because they last a long time, unlike real flowers. In fact, this particular cemetery turns into a sea of artificial floral offerings on Christmas and Mother’s Day.)
The first few times we have this conversation I expect a gasp of pain as death dashes her expectation of her mother and father turning up any minute. Now it feels like a game that no one wins but which must be played endlessly nonetheless — a game that drives me crazy.
The news that her mother and father are dead barely registers — there is no acknowledgement of loss, no memory of mourning.
I have to go anyway because my house is there, she continues with annoying stubbornness. That is where I live.
Usually by this stage I have had enough and end the conversation with ‘‘Well, you can’t go anywhere today’’ and go to my room. If it’s the weekend, a promise of a walk is an effective mood changer.
A variation on the parents about to zoom in from the beyond is a demand that her son drives her home. I’ll call him right now, she says, picking up the radio remote.
As usual, my first instinct is to fight her condition in the vain hope that it can be altered. It’s probably a little like a teetotaller living with an alcoholic and compulsively emptying booze down the sink in the hope that things will change. Or beating your head against a brick wall to remove the wall.
You can’t drive to Croatia because it is across the ocean, I drone on. You are almost 85 years old and you don’t have a passport. You might not like sitting in an aeroplane for 24 hours. Your house has long been sold, so you will have nowhere to live.
She looks at me as if I am the crazy one. I still want to go to see if my house is there ... and my grandparents and my aunties and all my friends. I start looking for a brick wall.
Sometimes I accept what I can’t change and mumble something about her son not being able to drive her home today as he is on holidays.
Sensible people living with alcoholics join Al-Anon. I’ll have to look around for a support group.
