A family's life

And, with her passing from life as dementia took her, so too passed a family.

She had been not 'just' that invisible glue that had held us together, these 3; she had been the driving force, the direction that we followed. Our destinations were hers, shared; our joys, hers, given.

Because of this, there are things that I will never now know about her, and about her life.

I know, for instance, that she was born in 1922, and so would have been coming of age, 18, near the outbreak of World War II. But I not once heard her speak about that time. She never shared an opinion, didn't comment, made no statement. It was a blank, in her shared life with us.

I know also that she had, before us, a life that was enviably full, complete with friendships, businesses, property and action; and that these she put to one side, entirely, for the sake of what she wanted.

And I know that she spoiled the child because he was the true reason for the family, for her. To deny him - perhaps, I suspect - might have been to revisit the deprivations, and possibly degradations, of wartime.

I'll never know, now. The dementia took these moments from us both in an instant; any possibility of asking, gone. Any chance to tell her, after so many years, that the weight of these memories could be shared, finally, with the child around whom she'd made a future, gone.

- - - - -

Each decision in our family life, made then and here with what's left, now, was shaped by force of will, and a possibly-desperate desire for a foreseeable future for each of us, together; but today, the structures of what is left - house, belongings, security, family itself - have become sand, falling through shaking hands.

When the dementia roared in, and ravaged everything she was in an awful, short moment, everything that she was simply ceased to be. And what she'd worked to build, struggled to maintain, grappled with in creating and safeguarding, fell then into the hands of a man too weak even to say the disease's name.

- - - - -

Our family's rooms - I can no longer call it home, now - were lined, and populated, with echoes, totems of who she was, and the way she understood a life, truly lived. Each item, from the mundanities of crockery to the boy's bookshelf encyclopediae, deliberately gathered. Every painting, every decoration, hers and an expression of a time, a place, people from our lives as a family; moments, and the parts that made those moments.

And each part of her that lined and made whole our shared spaces as a family, in the same moment as they illuminated and demonstrated her in mind and attitude, in care and thought, these things also illuminated the man's absence. There is nothing there of his. No photographs, no paintings. No books, and no interests. A cheap, plastic keyring on a kitchen counter, there, and a catalogue for the empty: "buy some garbage, get a chance to win a million dollars". Where a man might have been, there is...nothing. Not even an echo of the man I once thought I saw in photos of father and newly-adopted child, together for the first time on a bright beach in the Australian sun.

What there is left of us now is myself, and the every-moment more-dissolute wreckage of a man discovered to have not been present, both because of the absences left by his own lifelong impairments and in the form of a void where even the simplest courage could not in any way, at any time, take root; a family's life, come to an end.

I doubt there will even be a marker for us, soon.