Kate Durrant: 'I wish I had recognised ‘lasts’ for what they were'

In February 2017, PJ Lynch was diagnosed with dementia, joining the 64,000 people in Ireland living with the condition. His partner, writer Kate Durrant, shares the love, loss - and joy that remains - through extracts from the diary she began keeping after his diagnosis.

PJ Lynch, who was diagnosed with dementia in 2017, joining the 64,000 people in Ireland living with the condition. His partner Kate Durrant, shares the love, loss -and joy that remains - through extracts from the diary she began keeping after his diagnosis. Picture: Larry Cummins.

Colder days are coming I have no doubt that this is to be our last winter. 

Our nights are drawing in, the colours are fading, the leaves are dropping.

Colder days are coming.

Yet I run in and out of the house as though there is time — as though we have time.

Dallying over which chicken to buy.

Do we need two litres of milk or will one do?

As though any of it matters.

***

Pyjamas have become your uniform — you who wore sharply creased slacks, not jeans, on a Sunday. The elastic-waisted trousers unrecognisable to the man who once matched his pocket square to his tie, yet marking time more honestly than any calendar.

I wish I could remember the last time you buckled a belt or pulled up a zip.

I wish I had recognised those ‘lasts’ for what they were.

But we don’t know how momentous those days are when we’re living them, days when the kettle boiled for you and the fridge opened at your touch as you chose what you ate and when you ate it.

***

I work my way through list-filled days, finding micro-reasons to leave the house.

Walking the dogs slowly, buying milk one day and bread the next, calling into the chemist for one prescription and returning later for the other.

Small evasions carrying with them the faint hope that things might somehow be different when I return home, while dreading that they might be.

You are the reason I keep leaving the house, and the reason I hurry home again.

***

I open the paper bag from the chemist and begin the meditative task of sorting the nine daily tablets into their pill-a-day compartments. Each one promising another day of health, a promise that grows less convincing every time I open the bulging bag.

Still, they give me something to do, another small way of believing I’m helping.

Morning. Evening. The one that mustn’t be taken with grapefruit juice.

Have you ever had grapefruit juice?

Every month I do this.

Every month, I wonder if this will be the last time before I return them to the chemist with the small, understanding smile.

I’ll probably take chocolates or biscuits, definitely a card.

Thank you for everything…

***

In the sunroom, the wooden tray that holds your tissues and juice pack thuds against the coffee table.

You agitate it with your knee and bang it up and down. You can do it for hours. It’s really annoying.

I’m going to miss it so much.

I pull you up, your two hands tightly clasped in mine, my foot lodged behind the leg of the heavy oak coffee table –my ballast.

One, two, three... and up you come, slowly, head down.

You fall into me and we hug. Well, I hug, you cling on, exhausted.

“It’s alright, Mum has you.” The words coming from the same place as the rub that once soothed my small children’s grazed knees.

Some things, it seems, the hands never forget.

***

Kate Durrant: "It’s your six-monthly ophthalmology appointment. The rhythm of our life dictated by the window envelopes that land on our mat with depressing regularity.

We’re building a Lego model of the Titanic.

Well, I am.

You, the man who could knock down a wall and rebuild it on a Sunday
afternoon, now sit watching.

I offer you a brick. You shake your head.

I offer another and you close your eyes, your way of telling me to feck off.

I love that you can still dismiss me; that you’re not held hostage to the fussing and faffing that drove you mad in our former life.

Maybe it still does.

There are a bewildering number of small coloured bricks scattered across the table and I don’t know where to start.

“Welcome to my world,” I can nearly hear you say.

***

You love your phone,
indiscriminately pressing its buttons.

You hate its refusal to talk to you.

No new messages.

No saved messages.

“Something wrong with this,” you say, not understanding that it is those who used to call that are faulty.

“We’ll look at it tomorrow,” I say, putting it into the drawer on top of the bucket-list book I bought you, back in the time when plans were still ours to make.

We’d made it a habit of scribbling a wish for the coming year, your handwriting becoming less certain with each entry.

2017 See Sorrento 2018 See Austria And then, year unknown, See next year.

***

I brought myself flowers today.

I reached for the lilies, but chose the Sweet William instead, a soft blur of pinks and purples.

You were a great man for bringing home flowers.

Birthdays, anniversaries, wet
Tuesdays and sunny Sundays.

Never garage flowers, always the florist.

Sometimes the white lilies I loved, but more often hothoused red roses, giant peonies and towering delphiniums. You loved colour.

I’d tell you not to waste your money.

“They’d be half the price in the supermarket,” I’d say.

Now I find myself searching for colour wherever I can find it.

***

The creak of the bedroom door wakes me. You’re fumbling with the handle, the hotel-branded tote bag that hangs behind the door now slung over your shoulder. Printed with the words For all the things you’ve forgotten, it is stuffed with yesterday’s discarded clothes and has become your constant companion.

“Come back to bed,” I say as the oversized numbers on the digital clock click to 3.33.

I collect moments like this.

Three threes on the clock, two magpies. Making bargains with a universe that has shown absolutely no interest in negotiating with us.

***

I pull apart the wobbling squares of jelly that cling stubbornly to each other.

“Sorry,” I say as I drop them one by one into what has become known as the jelly bowl.

Sometimes I sneak fruit into it. Soft bananas. Tinned peaches cut small.

Occasionally you eat them.

“And that’s Debussy,” the radio presenter says as the red tendrils of the jelly bleed into the boiled water.

I scribble Clair de Lune onto the back of another hospital appointment.

I’ll add it later to the untitled document on my laptop, my fingers refusing to type funeral.

Refusing to plan – while planning –for a room full of people when the only one I want is you.

Suit, pocket square, matching tie.

NO SHOES!

Readings?

Beckett – In The Silence Raymond Carver – Beloved Fitzmaurice – Just to be beside you is enough.

Because it has always been enough. It still is.

***

PJ Lynch and his partner Kate Durrant. Picture: Larry Cummins.

I strain to free the super-king, 800-thread-count fitted sheet. It’s caught in the base of the awkward bed frame where I tucked it yesterday with such optimism.

The sheet fights me at every corner, literally, and I twist the linen around my fists and yank until the bed releases it, sending me sprawling into the damp clothes I stripped from you earlier.

I pull myself up, blinking back tears – from the fall, I tell myself — as Sisyphus-like I ball the sheets and dump them in front of the washing machine, groaning as I catch sight of yesterday’s sheets still hanging on the line.

I carry small tied black bags out to the bin, which once rattled with coffee pods and wine bottles. Evidence of visitors, weekends and ‘just because’ celebrations.

The sound muffled now by what passes for underwear, while the glass bin lies empty.

Jobs done, I rest my forehead against the doorframe for a moment before pushing open the shower room door. I never get used to finding you like this. Slumped in the plastic shower chair, the flannel I’d given you lying unused in your hands, as the tepid water falls on your bewildered head.

You turn your face towards me as I open the door, shivering at the cold air that follows me in.

I squeeze your hand as I take the flannel.

“A rub and a promise,” I say, sounding like my mother, feeling like your mother.

***

It’s your six-monthly ophthalmology appointment. The rhythm of our life dictated by the window envelopes that land on our mat with depressing regularity.

Grateful for them, though. They are, at least, proof that someone is still measuring, still caring.

They are outings too, I tell myself.

You’re wearing your out-out pyjamas — DKNY no less.

“You look great,” I say.

You give me a monk-like nod, not doubting for a minute.

They’re a chatty lot in the waiting room. Like us, this is their social life.

“You been in to X-ray yet?” “I have, boy.” 

“She took a couple of photographs and told me I was a stunner.” His wife catches my eye and rolls hers. She’s heard it all before.

Their chat moves on — the men outdoing each other with the geriatric equivalent of the fish that got away.

“Only ten tablets a day? Aren’t you the lucky one?” “Dr Barry? I calls him Mick. Says he’s never seen a case like mine.” You close your eyes as they chat, and we wait. I rest my head on your shoulder – this is date day after all.

You’re folding and unfolding the tissue the nurse gave you.

Kate Durrant: "I put a side plate of shepherd’s pie in front of you, a small portion of lasagne, a slice of ham with buttery potatoes — taking them away barely touched and replacing them with a bowl of hot custard, cold jelly and tinned peaches, softer food for this gentler time in our lives." Picture: Larry Cummins

Seven folds. That’s supposed to be the most it will take, no matter how large the paper.

Everything has its limits.

The drops in your eyes sting, and a single tear rolls down your face.

“It’s very blurry,” you say.

I squeeze your hand.

It is that.

You were unable to sleep last night –which meant we were all unable to sleep – so the rumble of the early morning bin lorry comes as a relief.

The nights are like this now. You sleep all day and stumble around the house all night. Well, the small corner of it that we still inhabit.

How did life ever get so big? We started out with so little, but somehow ended up needing so much. So much space. So many rooms. So many
clothes. Yet, everything you own now slides neatly into two drawers beneath the adapted bed downstairs.

I follow, trying to encourage you back to the bedroom as you open and close doors, flicking lights on and off, wearing me down one switch at a time. Calling the dogs with the soft click of your tongue that doesn’t quite land.

“Tsk-tsk.” Wanting them up too. All for one and one for all, it seems.

I put a side plate of shepherd’s pie in front of you, a small portion of lasagne, a slice of ham with buttery potatoes — taking them away barely touched and replacing them with a bowl of hot custard, cold jelly and tinned peaches, softer food for this gentler time in our lives.

For the dogs, of course, this is a golden age. Following each rejected meal back to the kitchen, not understanding what is being lost, only that there is food.

I envy them that.

I wonder how many more meals you will ignore, how many more bowls of custard you will eat.

Because when the chair beside mine in the sunroom no longer holds your imprint, I’m not sure what the dogs are going to do.

• September is World Alzheimer’s Month, and the Alzheimer’s Memory Walk takes place nationwide in Ireland on Sunday, September 20. Visit alzheimer.ie