Our grandfather’s clock….
Integrating three generations into one household is not as simple as it might seem. There is not always a natural compatibility between the very young and the aged. My children battled to understand their grandfather when he came to live with us, and it took a while for them to differentiate between his personality, his eccentricity and his disability, wrought by vascular dementia. He was obsessed with the passing of time, and wanting to be sure of the hour of the day, he stopped frequently to remonstrate with his antique wind-up clocks which had invariably stopped. Once when we drove past a university building, I pointed it out to my children as the place where Grandpa had once worked.
“Ah,” said my youngest,” that must be a watch factory.” The gulf between his experience of the world and theirs was immense. They observed him initially as a defective, curmudgeonly intrusion into their lives. And that made me sad.
In the beginning it was particularly difficult. We were staying at that point in a rented house, so we all felt displaced. My father was grumpy. He hated being away from his home which we were renovating, and he found the quiet suburban cul-de-sac where we found ourselves too noisy. He told my guitar-playing son to stop that horrible noise. He referred to my son and daughter as “that boy” and “the little girl”, not remembering their names. His social filters were fading away one by one. It was evident in the noises he would make while eating. His unashamed burps at dinner would send my wide-eyed children into suppressed snorts of laughter while we made faces at them to be quiet. Sometimes he would join in with explosive giggles of his own.
So after a few weeks, instead of fighting it, we decided that humour was one way to lighten our load. And so we agreed that we were able to laugh a little behind Grandpa’s back at the strange things he did in his demented state, without descending into full-blown ridicule. And each fit of giggles was a wonderful release from the tension of living intimately with somebody who was unable to respond usefully to the people caring for him.
Out of this humour, came the story of the GSO – the Grandpa Spying Organisation. It emerged as a fantasy sci-fi tale, while we were remarking on my father’s toilet paper habit. He was terribly anxious about running out of loo paper. Once we moved back home, he would come into the house unannounced, slip into the bathroom where I kept the spare toilet paper in a large box, with stealth stow three rolls under his arm and disappear quickly back into his apartment. He seldom asked for toilet paper, he just worked out where I stored it and he took roll after roll after roll.
Early morning shadows on a toilet roll - this basic necessity has aesthetic potential
We were amazed at the regularity of these trips. It was like watching an ant carry off little white grains of sugar, and then return for more, in an eternal, secretive loop. Where was all the paper going? One of the children suggested that the dementia was just a cover for a sophisticated global spying operation, headed by Grandpa from his apartment. The reason why he slept all day was because he was up all night holding meetings and ruling the world. And at those night time gatherings, he handed out toilet paper to his fellow spies in attendance. As we discussed this around the dinner table, the story became more and more fantastical, and we created all sorts of plot twists. Every time he did something out of the ordinary, a new chapter of the GSO would be born. And in this way, the children’s resentment lessened, and they looked at him with a fonder curiosity than before. What would he do next, and how could they use that to spin the story further? Their imagination kicked in to relieve the trauma of disability.
Dad’s obsession with rolls of toilet paper definitely provided a lengthy trail of narrative. In the early days of his dementia, he used to have a sleep-over at an old friend of his. I would help him pack. To start with, I would give him a list of things to take with him. As he lost his ability to gather items and stow them, I found myself supervising, because all he would put in his overnight bag was a pair of spare shoes, a bottle of wine and a roll of toilet paper. I suppose it spoke of the panic that might be felt if at the critical moment, he was without any of those items. I would let the roll go to Somerset West and sometimes it came back.
One day, I came home from the supermarket with one of those 18-roll budget packs of toilet paper, which are so large that they are awkward to carry. I plonked it on the kitchen table just as my father was coming through. We sat down for tea, the stash at our elbows. He looked approvingly at it a number of times, and I could see he was thinking things through. And then he asked in a conversational tone, with a tone of approval, from where I had got such a fine haul.
“Oh, at the supermarket,” I answered and by way of demonstrating what I meant, I showed him the receipt showing the price I had paid for it. He examined the slip, took a sip of tea and then leant forward conspiratorially.
“You know,” he said looking over his shoulder. “If you go round there…” and he pointed at the bathroom, “You can get it for free.”
For a moment, I was part of the conspiracy too. And with as straight a face as I could muster, I thanked him for the useful tip.
I was able to share the story at suppertime. We laughed a great deal and could do so openly because by now, I was serving Grandpa in his apartment. It has become too difficult to have him with us at dinner because he eats noisily and spills from his mouth. He consumes his food with a mechanical single-mindedness, oblivious to other distractions and unaware of any company he might have.
But he is mentioned in many an evening conversation at our dinner table, across the courtyard. Do you know what Grandpa said today? Do you know that he put the tea cosy on his head because he couldn’t find his hat? And we laugh and it feels good because comedy is more useful than tragedy.
Copyright Marion Edmunds – October 2021