An acquaintance asked, “Have you got her a toy cat yet?”
Reading my expression as one of incomprehension, she elaborated: “You know, a teddy-bear cat – something she can pet?”
A year ago my understanding of the raw end of dementia was less well developed than it is now. I was still straddling an innocent’s position of denial and disbelief. So the look on my face that day wasn’t just because I didn’t grasp the question.
It was because I was appalled by it.
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A toy cat?
I must have said it out loud because she rushed to expand on the theme. “My mother’s on her fourth,” she said. “She strokes them until their fur falls out. When they’re bald, we just buy her another one.”
Just buy her another one.
Twelve months later, though, with Mum much more frail, and I can see where that cat-woman might have been going with this: Mum seems to feel more comfortable, confident, in the company of animals than humans.
My fat neutered cat (“Is it a she?” Mum asks several times a day. “No ma, it’s a he” – was a he) is greeted with enthusiastic calls of pusspusspusspuss every time he appears.
Mum rises from her chair, as the cat weaves his way plumply through the door. Seeing where she’s headed, towards the tea-making paraphernalia, the cat gathers pace and trots alongside her. Mum begins to dig about for treats for him. I used to keep a bag of cat biscuits in her room so she could feed him. Every time he miaowed, she poured him another bowlful and his already ample girth grew rounder, and I feared he may keel over with furred arteries. I took the biscuits away. The cat, not surprisingly, turned his nose up at the peppercorns Mum dribbled into his bowl instead.
My Labrador has taken to sitting as close to Mum as she can during meals. When she thinks I’m not looking, Mum tosses her all manner of treats: toast crusts, a biscuit, a bit of banana (astonishingly, for a Labrador, declined) and many, many cheese crisps.
“Stop feeding her at the table, Mum,” I reprimand. “She’s going to start begging.”
Sorry, says Mum. And – forgetting my stern words instantly – is at it again minutes later. Dementia, in this case, is a dog’s best friend.
Oddly‚ when the dog went to the vets and was incarcerated for three weeks post surgery, Mum didn’t forget about her or why she wasn’t with us. She asked about her every day and reported on her progress to anybody who called: “Jip is still at the vet having an operation” on her (variously) foot, leg, tummy or head.
You think, every time the disease plateaus and you find a new equilibrium, that things can’t get worse. But they do. They always do
Mum was thrilled to see her back. Almost as thrilled as Jip was to see Mum: she went barrelling into her room impeded by a bucket collar to stop her chewing stitches out, which made Mum roar with laughter. And then the toast crusts and biscuits and crisps got thrown about again and I could hear Jip scrabble, hampered by the collar, to retrieve them.
Mum! Stop feeing her!
“Oh sorry, I forgot.”
If Mum remembered Jip, the cat didn’t and was disgusted at the arrival (return) of apparent newcomer. He sat up high glaring crossly down at the very animal that until three weeks ago he’d shared a bed, often a bowl, with. So disgruntled was he that he was forced to find somewhere new to sleep and why not try your luck with the peppercorn dispenser again (perhaps she’d have kibbles this time?)
One night not long after Jip’s return, I woke in the small hours and noticed my mother’s bedroom lights ablaze.
On inspection I find her up, chatting to the cat who is threading his way perilously between her ankles.
“Mum, what are you doing? It’s 2 in the morning!”
“Is it?” She doesn’t look as if she cares. She doesn’t even comment on the hour.
“Well, puss and I were very cold so I thought I’d get up and fix us both a snack – a cup of tea for me and something for puss.”
Something for puss turns out to be a gloop of Weetabix, hot water and about 17 spoons of sugar. He sticks his nose into the bowl briefly, then stalks off. I urge Mum back to bed but she’s still fretting about the cat. “Where is he? He was freezing.” (He wasn’t, he has a thick coat and walrus-like blubber as insulation.)
“He’s gone ratting,” I lie. The cat is watching me beadily from the door hoping I might push off and Mum get round to finding him something else to eat.
“I tried so hard to encourage him to settle down and get warm,” says Mum. “I put him under the blankets and everything.”
I almost laugh – this mental image of Mum wrestling an obese cat beneath her duvet, like a child, intent on keeping him there.
When I check on Mum again at a civilised 7am, her room is in disarray. Momentarily, I wonder if she has been hunting down the cat again, or, rather, trying to pin it down. But that’s not why. She is in a state of undress because she has soiled herself in the night. Fecal incontinence is the latest symptom of all this. It’s everywhere.
The cat long gone.
I clean Mum up, mop the floor, strip the bed, chuck the whole lot into the washing machine. This is our reality now. Adult nappies and eternal laundry and conversations that go round and round and round.
You think, every time the disease plateaus and you find a new equilibrium, that things can’t get worse. But they do. They always do: that’s the nature of this horrible downhill disease.
With sad resignation I punch “dementia toy cat” into Google. There are dozens at Amazon. I am strangely heartened. Because I am reminded, again, I’m not on my own in this.
Keeping Mum: A dementia diary
- ‘I forgot you were my daughter’
- Time for a holiday
- Is depression key?
- ‘Cures’ are too hard to resist
- Mum is aghast when I say we’re her daughters
- Mum remembers nobody
- Mum only has today
- Everything about my mother is shrinking
- The word dementia is not enough
- An eraser across the blackboard
- Mum doesn’t seem, well, bothered
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