We all - my whole family, and my father, turned up at the Nursing Home this morning. She coped very well with her small room being suddenly crowded with five visitors all at once, and with the exchange of presents. What do you take someone in a nursing home who is not supposed to be eating or drinking? Boxes of chocolates, and bottles of whisky are not quite the thing in those circumstances. I brought a trough planted up with tete-a-tete daffodils which should flower fairly soon. My father brought - yes - earrings! And a super-soft purple scarf.
We (me and my family) left at about noon, thinking that it would be better if my father stayed on for lunch on his own in order not to wear my mother out. To our surprise, the nurses had persuaded my mother to get up, and go down in her wheelchair for lunch.
The staff had set up a special table for two in the conservatory rather than in the dining room. They say, and we agree, that it is a bit galling to be in the main dining room watching everyone tuck into their platefuls of food while you are just being offered purees of this that and the other.
So, the two of them had a specially prepared and served Christmas Dinner. There was smoked salmon on bread for my father, and pureed smoked salmon for my mother. Each component of her meal was pureed separately and carefully arranged on a plate. With great trepidation, my father gave in to my mother's insistence that she would be fine eating little pieces of smoked salmon. And she was. She also ate a fair quantity of Christmas Dinner, followed by some ice cream, after which time she was tired and ready to go back to bed.
This isn't at all how we expected December to end.
The (replacement) Advent candle is about finished, and we seem to have finished a phase in my mother's illness. Now we just have to see how things go on. I'm not sure where we are headed next - we're just enjoying how things are at the moment.
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