Barbara Shillingstone (left), today diagnosed with Alzheimers, and her son John Ratcliff (right)
The woman I’m having a coffee with in the nursing home’s bright foyer smiles politely. She looks down at her cup and then back at me, blankly. She doesn’t know what to say.
It’s taking all I’ve got not to break down and cry — not that she notices or seems concerned. And that’s the hardest thing.
For this isn’t a stranger I’m meeting: the woman sitting opposite is my mum, and she has absolutely no idea who I am.
My mother, Barbara, 93, has Alzheimer’s, which was diagnosed two years ago. These past few months, my brother and I have watched, powerless, as she has succumbed to the disease, her once fine mind curling in on itself.
Yet this is the first time Mum has failed to recognise me. As I sit there with her, now tiny in the armchair, she’s at least 6 in smaller than in her prime, I’m overcome with grief; I have lost her, even though she is physically there.
A few weeks earlier when I’d seen her last, Mum had hugged me and said how lucky she felt to have me and my brother.
On that visit, for perhaps the first time in her life, she’d dropped her usual brave front and had broken down and cried, saying how sorry she was that she’d become such a liability.
To go from that to no recognition at all as she sits before me . . . there is nothing you can do to prepare yourself for that moment.
Earlier in the morning, I’d driven up from Somerset and had gone to the nursing home with my brother, Peter, and sister-in-law, Janet.
It was the first time I’d visited Mum since she’d moved into a care home in Harrogate and I was anxious to see her.
As we went into Mum’s room, she was calm, smiling, but her eyes didn’t meet mine. Instead she just gazed past me.
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We’d been advised to give her cues, to introduce ourselves when we first saw her. ‘Hi, it’s your son, John,’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied, trailing off into a slight nervous giggle, as if to say ‘I know you’re my son,’ aware she needed to be polite — she always was very good at making out everything was fine.
But there was no connection there at all. For something to do, we went downstairs to have a coffee.
Mum sat there agreeably enough, but she could only stare, saying nothing — this from the woman who we would say could talk for England. I wanted to cry, but I tried not to show it in case it distressed her.
I kept it together until I left, but as soon as I stepped outside the care home door, I wept on my brother’s shoulder.
My first proper memory of Mum is the look on her face when I played her a tune on a ukulele my dad had made for me from a wooden cigar box.
‘Mum sat there agreeably enough, but she could only stare, saying nothing — this from the woman who we would say could talk for England,’ John said. ‘I wanted to cry, but I tried not to show it in case it distressed her’
I was only about four or five, and she didn’t say anything — never one to be quick with praise, my mother — but there was a gleam in her eye I assumed was pride.
It is a look I’ve detected from time to time over the years, but one I’ll never see again.
It all feels especially cruel as she was always fiercely proud of us, her boys. Widowed at an early age — my father died suddenly after a brain haemorrhage at 44, when she was 42 — it was Mum who kept us on track.
I was ten, Peter was 14, and Mum found herself having to be the breadwinner for the first time. She got a job as librarian in a tough school in Peckham, South-East London — not that she took any nonsense from anyone.
Money had always been tight — and now it was all on her. She and Dad had always been determined that we’d go to private school, and fortunately Peter and I got scholarships, which helped.
A young Barbara Shillingstone, who worked as an ambulance driver during the second World War
Mum really was the driver of our family — quite literally. She’d been an ambulance driver in the war and motoring was her passion.
She’d ferry us all around, even when Dad was alive. Though she could have, she never re-married, preferring, I think, to focus on us.
As a teenager, I played rugby for the first team at school and she never missed a match, casting a solitary figure on the sidelines on freezing January days.
It feels a cruel sort of irony, but I remember wishing she wouldn’t come, afraid I’d be thought of as a mummy’s boy.
And long after Peter and I had left home, she remained the family stalwart.
She moved to be nearer to us when grandchildren started to arrive, and she was always offering me her unique brand of career advice, usually: ‘When are you going to get a proper job?’
Even when my career in the music industry took off (I’m a professional music producer and discovered, managed and produced the band A-ha), she still said the same thing, though I’m sure I detected that old gleam of pride when I gave her one of my platinum records.
For years she lived close to my brother and his four children in West Yorkshire. She was ferociously independent, always telling us what good nick she was in for her age.
But about six years ago she moved into an extension at their home after a few problems with her blood pressure had led to some minor falls.
For a while that worked well, though I always felt guilty I wasn’t around more. My work was mainly in London and I travelled a lot, but we spoke on the phone almost every day.
Then three years ago, driving home from Tesco, she veered into the back of a parked car — fortunately, the car was empty, but we’d been begging her for months to stop driving as she was becoming absent-minded.
The crash could have been far worse. Two young children had just got out or they would probably have been killed. It was a major warning something was wrong.
John has worked in the entertainment industry since the age of 13, and is best known for discovering, producing and managing the Norwegian supergroup ‘A-Ha’
Mum had done a few odd things in the recent months — she’d say all her teaspoons had gone missing and they’d turn up in the wardrobe. Or she’d forget eating a packet of biscuits and say they’d disappeared.
After the crash she was immediately noticeably worse. So much so, I wonder if it did something to her brain. As well as confused, she became paranoid — insistent ‘a man’ was coming into her part of the house and stealing things. The one good thing was that she gave up her driving licence.
A few months later, she had a serious fall, injuring her leg. Because of this, she had to see the doctor regularly.
It was at an appointment to check the wound on her leg that the spectre of dementia was raised. It confirmed what deep down we probably all knew — though when you’re in the thick of it, it’s hard to know what is normal ageing and what’s not.
About six months after the accident, Mum was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
She was immediately put on medication that can sometimes help alleviate anxiety and confusion and improve concentration, though we were told that her condition might have developed too far for it to be of any real help.
Though the medication seemed to lift the paranoia, over the next year, Mum could do less and less for herself and was also forgetting to eat. My sister-in-law cooked and cleaned for her, and was in and out of the flat round the clock.
WHAT IS ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE?
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia.
The word dementia describes a set of symptoms that can include memory loss and difficulties with thinking, problem-solving or language.
Illustration of Alzheimer’s Disease attacking healthy brain cells
These symptoms occur when the brain is damaged by certain diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease.
This factsheet describes the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, how it is diagnosed, and the factors that can put someone at risk of developing it.
It also describes the treatments and support that are currently available.
There are more than 520,000 people in the UK with Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: Alzheimer’s Society
But with Mum’s memory failing, she’d ring me to say: ‘I haven’t seen anyone today — again.’
It was wearing everyone down. Mum was no longer remembering to wash or change her clothes. So last year, we started looking for care homes. I was dreading the move. But to our relief, in the new place Mum was happier than in years.
Funnily enough, it was only once the Alzheimer’s set in that she would talk to me about Dad — growing up, we never spoke about him. I think it was her way of protecting herself from grief.
But now she started to open up, telling me how they met on a blind date at the end of the war and were married within four months; how he was musical like me and had entertained the troops on the piano accordion.
Being able to talk like this was lovely — it was one of the few good things to come out of it. Now this has been taken away, too.
After that heartbreaking visit, I drove back to Somerset, my mind whirring. I decided to write a song to raise money for research into dementia. After all, while this has been devastating for our family, it happens to so many people.
At home, I went straight to my studio and by the morning it was done. Every line made me cry.
I got in touch with the Alzheimer’s Society and arranged for the money from the record sales to go to them.
The one person I can’t play the song to is Mum — there would be no point. But I like to think she’d like it and that I’d see that old glint of pride in her eyes.
Into The Black by John Ratcliff, can be downloaded from iTunes or Amazon for 79p. alzheimers.org.uk. justjrproductions.com