30 April 2025

My mother is in hospital

So I seek the consolation of cats.

“I hope you had a smashing Easter,” begins an email from someone who goes on to ask me for some work which I am late with. It’s a nice, friendly opening, but it failed to hit the right note because, as it turned out, I had an absolutely lousy one.

The weekend before, I had come back to London to cook a Sunday lunch for my mother to celebrate her 98th birthday. But she had fallen in the night and my brother had to come at 1am to put her back to bed and see she was all right. When I got there she was still a bit woozy but I had cooking to do, other family members to talk to and a train back to Brighton to catch. But the next morning my brother called to tell me that her carer had found her on the floor in the morning, and that our mother was now in hospital; oh, and that he was leaving for the US for a couple of weeks.

So here I am, back in the childhood home in East Finchley again, typing this up in my childhood bedroom, prior to my daily visit to see an increasingly distressed and confused woman who believes she is being held prisoner against her will. Well, in a sense, she is.

“Why aren’t they screaming?” asks Larkin, of the old, approaching death. A very good question, I’ve always thought. But in the ward my mother has been relocated to there is a lady in the next bed who talks gibberish loudly and then goes “WOOOOOOOOO” a few dozen times until she gets tired of it. My mother thinks she’s in an attic because the ward is on the sixth floor and for the first time in the eight days she’s been there, she has a view. Stress increases her dementia; or, if you prefer, drastically reduces her ability to comprehend the world around her. From what I have gathered, it is as if the membrane between dream and reality has popped: she thought I’d had a party in her house and spilled Champagne and there was now a girl in my room. Damn – sounds like that’s a good party. Wish I’d gone to it. Or she asks me if I’ve seen the cat’s adorable new kittens. (The cat was fixed many years ago.) My eldest visited and my mother suggested they go down to the hotel bar and get a drink, perhaps a nice dry martini.

As delusions go, there are worse ones, I suppose, but the distress in her eyes when I say I have to leave is supremely painful. I, too, would not want to be left in a room full of Struldbruggs either. The Struldbruggs, you might recall, were the people discovered by Gulliver on one of his travels, identified at birth by a red dot on their foreheads. They were immortal, but continued to age, and after the age of 80, “they had not only all the follies and infirmities of other old men, but many more, which arose from the dreadful prospect of never dying. They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren.” I am not saying that my mother or the other inhabitants of the ward are like that, but you can understand why they are not all happy campers.

For me, things could be worse: she could be in the house with me. The last time I looked after her after a fall she became – how to put this? – somewhat needy, and you could have picked a few adjectives from that list above and not been too far off the mark.

So I shall think about the cat instead. The cat is of course graceful and aloof except around mealtimes; then she decides that I am a lovely chap who happens to have opposable thumbs, and aren’t they good for tearing open the sachets of Felix (“As good as it looks!” No, seriously, they say that on the package; it looks like cat food; so I shall just take their word for it), hint hint?

Actually, the cat is being more friendly than that. She sleeps on the fold-out bed with me, she follows me around companionably; when the weather is nice in the evening she joins me on the rickety bench in the garden’s last sunny spot of the day.

What is it about cats? Why am I so drawn to them, enjoy their company so much? I heard a theory that says you can catch a virus from them which basically makes you their slaves and I must have had it for a long time. If she is at the kitchen door I will get up to open the door to let her in, when there is a perfectly good cat flap right there. She is not a vocal cat, except to say “feed me”, which she pronounces “mew” in a small plaintive voice that would melt the heart of a tyrant. Sometimes I try to be a disciplinarian and say, “It’s too early for your supper; show some self-restraint,” but then I remember that the clocks went forward a month ago and she’s probably not used to the time change yet, poor thing.

I had a conversation the other day with someone who rang while also walking two dogs in the park. The conversation went something like: “How’s your mother? BARK BARK BARK Oh God, Lionel’s smelled some food BARK BARK BARK Oh God, now Louie’s run off with the ball BARK BARK BARK Look, I’ll call you back later.” Imagine if cats were like that. Or people.

[See also: The nastiness and cowardice of Kneecap]