11th July 2004 - Leaving Belsen

I’ve spent lifetimes at the home over the last two days, trying very hard to get my Dad’s room to look like somewhere he’d like to stay. It’s far from easy. I spend so long, probably giving time as a penance, but to little effect. There is no way of disguising the fact it’s one small room with a sink in it and a wee loo in a room off. There’s no amount of pictures, photo’s and placing of a ‘few wee bits and pieces from his home’ going to make this room look like a ‘home’ and not a room in one. No disguising the hospital bed, the panic alarms, the smell. God when will I get used to this smell. I hang graduation photo’s of us – his three kids – although if I were him I’d not want to be reminded of the education I’d strived to give the three children who’d now he needs them are leaving him in a room, in a locked floor that smells of the piss of strangers. Strangers mind, not even his own piss.

I try the bed in one corner, then the other – the remaining two being not available due to the sink or the loo enclosure. I decide to put it at 90 degrees to the long wall, about a third down to make a vague stab at a living area and a sleeping area. His named nurse comes in to meet me, and fairly forcefully suggests that the bed needs to be against the long wall to give one less way he could fall out of it. Makes sense I suppose, but means his bookcase can’t stay. I suspect a bookcase might be redundant in a few months anyway.

When my brother arrives with my Dad, he ( brother ) is in a foul mood. I’ve never seen him in a worse one. I suppose transporting one huge case, one large one and one small plus an invalided father through a London airport can’t have been an easy task. Especially as – it turns out – Dad decided when my brother turned up, that he would just stay with my sister. My sister was slowly going mad having him in her house, and had gone away for the weekend that Dad was to move out, to try and make it easier as she’d have caved in and not let him go. He was persuaded to go but had obviously been bloodyminded enough to make the journey as difficult as he could.

So my brother leaves, as soon as he can, which is understandable I suppose, he’d had his fill. The carer who is helping to get Dad settled in a friendly, cheery wee soul but the drawback – from Dad’s viewpoint – is that she’s Indian. The drawback from my viewpoint is that she talks to me, all the time and not to him. She asks me “What does he like to eat?”, “What did he used to like doing?” and “Is he continent?”. Dad meekly sits and listens, doesn’t pipe up. Even after I start repeating her questions to him to get him to answer for himself, she still waits until I relay the answer and then fires the next to me.

She leaves – to let us get settled in. It’s getting near 3 so I suggest we do to the day room for a cup of tea. On the way out of his room we pass Sleeping Molly asleep on the floor where she’s fallen. She often does this, just keels over and sleeps, quite often hurting herself in the process. We step over her. This could have been the first sign to Dad that the home was not going to be like a sitcom – no Waiting for God here, no perfectly able and mentally with it types with crackling sexual chemistry.

In the dayroom they are wheeling in the ‘non walkers’. There’s one woman who I swear is thinner than a skeleton, I can’t understand how she can be so thin and still alive. Her pose is fixed and twisted, both arms bent, like one of those bodies caught in lava, but she’s alive. Like a concentration camp body, thrown in a mass grave pit. Can’t move, can’t speak, but moans and breaths and hangs on.

Dad’s colour is leaving him. He’s shrinking. His eyes are filling up. We find a table and he’s served tea. He finishes his tea and says “You’d better get on then. No point both of us being in this madhouse” and I leave him. Leave him in Belsen, in Bedlam, in living hell. And I weep. Weep for Dad, weep for what I've seen, weep for not being more of a person, weep for my inadequacy. And then I'm angry with myself for my self-indulgence, I want to go back in and tell him to come with me, he'll come and live with me and I'll not take no for an answer. And then I know I'm not going to, that I'm not enough, that I'd hate him, that I'd resent every minute I spent with him rather than my children, my longed for, precious children. So I cry.