Mother

She's no longer with us.

Physically she's still on this earth of course. At this moment in hospital to recover from her being badly treated at the nursing home for the extremely demented. Of course that's what this is about, dementia. Her greatest fear and ultimately her downfall.

She'd been falling down for years and explaining it away with her 'dicky hip'. What is more likely now is that she'd been having strokes. Starting small and getting larger each time. Leaving her disoriented and alone on the floor unable to get back up again. The last time, we think, for days. But she wasn't, and probably eventually couldn't, tell anyone that something more was happening than just losing her balance. For the last thing she wanted was to be put into a hospital, close second on her list of greatest fears.

No one in England is telling us what is exactly wrong with her, mostly because they don't know, but its probably vascular dementia. Perfectly treatable if caught early on. There's the irony. Her fear of hospitals is probably the reason why she didn't ring the alarm bells sooner, thereby letting the strokes increase in strength and severity until the dementia was full blown and untreatable let alone reversible.

She used her fears as father used his to control my brother and I.

Father told me that I was to blame that mother's mother developed premature dementia, my accident triggering the process. My first night in hospital was with mother in the next bed after she'd passed out upon seeing me.

But they're both gone now. Father for good, burnt and scattered. Mother's brain in much the same state.