How long has this been going on?

I might have seen it coming, but should I have seen it coming sooner?

I've already mentioned the "Harold got married in Belgium" incident.  Around the same time there were others pointing to the same conclusion.  Such as when Dad turned to my sister in law, let's call her June, who's been taking him on his weekly supermarket trip for a while now, and said "of course, you never knew my wife, did you?"

What?  I got married in 1972 and June's been part of the family ever since.  I'm not saying she and my mum would see each other every week, but quite a few times each year and certainly at Christmas.  Mum died in 2003 and June came to the funeral.  Major alarm bells ringing here.

Then, in early December after most of England had sithered to a standstill under one of the heaviest pre-Christmas snowfalls for decades, I rang Dad to see if he was OK and had managed to get to the supermarket.  Yes, he said, I went on Friday.

It was Friday.

I corrected him.  "You mean yesterday?  Yesterday was Thursday."

No, Dad "corrected" me, today's Saturday.  There's a coffee morning at church so it must be.

He was right about that: there was indeed a coffee morning at church and since church coffee mornings are ALWAYS on a Saturday, that was the day it had to be.  Of course, just this once they'd brought it forward but that was "new information" to Dad which, as I now realise, he can't process.  So it was Saturday.

He proved it to me by fetching a newspaper.  He knew today's hadn't come yet (he takes the local evening Telegraph) so this would be yesterday's.  Only that was Thursday's, obviously, so Dad drew the obvious conclusion.  The paper had got its date wrong.  We went round in circles for quite some time getting nowhere.  I told him to put the TV news on at the "top of the hour" and check the day, then I'd ring him back.

No sooner had I put the phone down than Dad rang June, complaining that I'd tried to persuade him it was Friday.  But Dennis, it is Friday, said June and that shocked him.  He must at that moment realised something was wrong with his computation processes.

By the time I rang him back he'd got over being perplexed and all was easily explained.  It was all to do with the change of arrangements for the coffee morning, an easy mistake to make.  Well maybe it was, Dad, but how do you explain your insistence that yesterday's paper had got the date wrong?  Why didn't you believe me?

As Famous Eccles, with whom I share an office, would later point out, it's Dad's lack of embarrassment that's so revealing.  We all get our days mixed up from time to time, you know I could have sworn it was Wednesday.  But this was different, not only in the way Dad held out against printed evidence that he was mistaken, but in his later brushing it aside as just another human slip.

These were clear signs, but it's impossible not to look back and wonder if there were others that one missed.  Like for instance his decision - this must be two years ago now - to replace the lounge curtains, which weren't that old and looked fine.  The sense that - OK, all old people like to reminisce - he felt safer and more comfortable talking about India in 1946 than the here and now.  Telling me news about people I've never heard of, then asking me if I'd heard of so and so, when I've known them for years.  None of this seemed any more than typical old man's forgettery at the time, but in the light of his diagnosis, one has to wonder.

Then there was the time, last summer I think, when he told me about his winning lottery numbers.  According to him, he and Mum were on holiday in Switzerland on the day of the first ever draw.  It was televised and they watched it in their hotel room.  And would you believe it, he'd picked all six winning numbers!  Hadn't bought a ticket of course, he'd just done it for a laugh.

Now, in itself, the story is not incredible though totally maddening.  But let's use a little imagination here.  He remembers watching the draw, he remembers picking some numbers for a laugh and wondering what it would be like to win an instant fortune.  But now his memory's malfunctioning, another element has crept into the storyline: the numbers he picked for a laugh were the ones that rolled out on the night.  How likely is that?  Well, a damn sight more likely than that he actually did get them all right.  Especially as within a few months he would be "remembering" that Harold got married in Belgium.

D'you when I think it all started and Dad at that point actually realised?  When, out of the blue in October 2009 he announced that he wanted to move out of his house into residential care.  Social Services came round, assessed him and pronounced that he didn't qualify for any support, he was "too well".  They were very thorough and I couldn't fault their conclusions.  I could immediately call to mind any number of old people far more infirm and disabled than him; but maybe there was prescience in his thinking.  He knew that he was starting, very gradually, to fall apart and would need more help to get him through his residue of days.  Now he's fallen apart much more, the need is as obvious to everyone else as it no longer is to him; but at least he accepts, for reasons he's not concerned to ask, that people are going to some lengths to assess all aspects of his health and social needs. 

I think I would have seen it coming earlier if I'd lived in the same town and been able to visit regularly; given that I don't and haven't, I'm not going to reproach myself for the penny's reluctance to drop.  Plus there's observing that things aren't quite right and being able to see it through the right lens.  Which brings me to the subject of his cleaner - next post.