The ugly cousin’s visit
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Meredith
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Peter Meredith's biography and other articles by this writer
Was this when it began? I was talking to my father on the phone. I was in Australia and he was in England. I was giving him some personal news when he suddenly broke in and said "Bye!" just like that, and hung up. I stared at the receiver for a long while before replacing it, wondering if I'd heard right.
Was that the first sign, the first small uncharacteristic act that should have warned me that something was amiss? But is it really possible to pinpoint the first sign? The medical evidence is that, with this particular disease, the first distinct manifestations represent a later stage in the whole process. They're like the first bubbles in water that's approaching boiling point; they mark a point in the heating process begun some time before. There may have been many signs that my family and I missed or ignored simply because we weren't looking. The phone incident was one. After my initial astonishment, I thought nothing more of it and told no one about it. I just made a note of it in my diary.
So what symptoms did we first consider worth discussing? What overt precursors were there of the untreatable and incurable brain disease that would eventually encage his mind in a disintegrating body and drag him rapidly, yet far too slowly, to his death? Actually, the question should cover more ground than that. It should ask something like: what symptoms did we first notice and then fail to discuss openly with everyone in the family, especially my mother?
Whatever the questions, the answers aren't hard to find. We're a writing family. Dispersed around the planet for four generations, family members were schooled early in the art of written communication. Letter writing cemented us into a unit even though we saw little of one another. For me this process began in the late 1950s when my parents were living in South America and sent me to school in England. From then on, whether I was in Europe, Africa or Australia (where I've lived since 1980), I received a letter from my mother fortnightly – or at the very least monthly – and I dutifully reciprocated. We filed each other's mail over the decades. After her death in 2001, I retrieved my letters, hundreds of them, from her archives. I have them all now, hers and mine. We must have filing-clerk genes. And then there are my diaries, going back more than 30 years. So there's a written record.
Dad's increasing eccentricity may have been a sign. In 1985, he and my mother had been living in semi-rural Surrey, in England's south-east, for some ten years after a lifetime of global postings. That year, while on holiday in England with my wife, Sue, I wrote in my diary:
Dad is more absentminded and eccentric than ever. He laughs and talks to himself a lot, loses himself in his sentences, misuses words, cuts himself off mid-sentence. He drinks a lot, or rather, drinks regularly. It worries me.
My two sisters, Gill and Jean, both younger than I and also living in England at the time, were beginning to worry by then too. Gill was finding my father cantankerous and difficult, as well as befuddled, but didn't agree with me that his drinking lay behind it. She felt, rather, that it had to do with his inability to adjust to retirement after his engaged, glamorous, globetrotting life as a director of a multinational corporation.
Up to a point I agreed. He himself acknowledged how frustrating retirement had been. In a memoir completed in the decade after he retired, he described his sense of loss at being so suddenly and completely ejected from the organisation that had been central to his life from the age of fifteen. "I became a has-been," he wrote.
Jean, a psychotherapist, viewed his mental state with a trained eye. While I was in England, she rang me out of the blue once to discuss him. He'd deteriorated rapidly within about a year, she said, but she was reluctant to point this out to Mum for fear of worrying her. She said his attention span was becoming shorter. Mum was reluctant to take him anywhere because he got bored quickly and insisted on going home. He was forgetful and often confused his facts but belligerently insisted he was right.
I'd noticed some of this, but mostly I was struck by the slurring of his speech. It was as though he were constantly drunk. At my parents' 45th wedding anniversary party, which was the climax of our UK visit, he was slurring so much that two guests asked if there was something wrong with him. I wrote later:
The old man hums tunelessly and loudly to himself and often goes off into the garden to be alone. He snaps irrationally at his family, us, but no sooner has that been done than his mood brightens once more. His gait is tending towards a shuffle; he is unsteady on his feet; he is beginning to stoop.
That year Dad was 63. Mum's letters over the next two years mentioned his increasing stiffness and walking difficulties and his "bad back", but seemed to accept all this as a normal concomitant of ageing.
His decline was inescapably evident when he visited Australia in 1987 with Mum and Gill. When I met them at the airport I was shocked at how much he'd aged. My diary: He mutters incoherently as though perpetually drunk ...
Mum slipped unquestioningly into the role of interpreter and mouthpiece for her husband. Left to his own devices, he got into trouble. On a number of occasions he lost his way in McMahons Point, where Sue and I were living in Sydney. Once he disappeared on the way to join us at a restaurant only five minutes' walk from our house. This was uncharacteristic for a former Royal Air Force navigator who, in World War II, had been able to position his bomber over a target in northern Italy on a cloudy, pitch-black night after a 1200 kilometre flight from Malta.
But then I wondered if perhaps he wasn't getting lost, merely delaying on purpose. Maybe he was scrabbling to maintain some control over a situation that was rapidly getting away from him. The company director was out of a job. Now he could see his time-honoured position as paterfamilias being sabotaged as well. Malign forces were at work, and the only way he could fight them was by masking them behind smokescreens of his own making. By pretending he was doing some of these strange things on purpose, he could retain some of his dignity and authority.
Subsequent letters from Mum spoke often of Dad's drunken gait and of his falling more frequently, hurting himself badly on occasion. It was clear from the letters that looking after Dad was becoming ever more burdensome for her, though she never admitted this openly to me. I found out later that she didn't admit it to other family members either. There was, as one of them said, a "conspiracy of silence" about Dad's condition and what it was doing to Mum. Her letters hinted at a titanic struggle only behind the hedge of expressions such as "We soldier on here" or "We plod along" or "Life goes on". They were subtly infused with that spirit of Stoic devotion that would, in later years, make her smilingly determined to continue caring for him to the very end.