Down to a sunless sea: memories of my dad

An additional piece written a year after the first 8 pieces. General content note: death, dementia, old age, mental health issues, euthanasia, suicide

15 min readOct 22, 2018

Waves

In physics, a wave is a disturbance that transfers energy through matter or space.*

It’s been a little over a year since I wrote the first eight pieces about my dad, our relationship and his dementia. During the months I was putting out those pieces, we had a family meeting and it was agreed that I would scale back my role in terms of providing him with daily support; instead, we would arrange for other people to play the roles that I had been providing (and to increase the level of his care in general). Part of the reason for this decision was that seeing one of the people I love the most in the world slowly becoming a different person had not been great for my already quite fragile mental health. Part of the reason was that devoting time every day to providing my dad with support was not helping me to generate work as a freelancer, and was adding a lot of stress into my work schedule. Part of the reason was that my siblings made it clear that they understood that I had been giving him everything that I could give, and they also made it clear that it was okay for me to step back. I felt that I had permission to pull away, that it was okay for me to focus on getting my own life together. I felt seen.

Waves consist of oscillations or vibrations of a physical medium or a field, around relatively fixed locations.

My dad would never have wanted me to lose the reins on my own life in order to keep his horse on track. When I talk about him in the past tense (as he often does himself) I do so not because he has died, but because I’m not sure that the man who exists now is the same man I used to know. He can’t fully comprehend what my life is like, or even what his own life is like. He’s never wanted to be a burden to anyone, but at this point, his independence, his attempts not to burden people, create a lot more work for everyone else, work that he is rarely aware of.

From the perspective of mathematics, waves, as functions of time and space, are a class of signals.

One of the things I learnt about myself when going through twenty weeks of therapy was that I had learnt to see myself as someone who had no choices. I had stopped thinking I had agency and starting thinking that I had to remain doing the things that were not helping my mental health. During therapy, I realised I could change lots of aspects of my life, although of course I can’t just choose to not make money or to always be mentally well. But even limited choices are still choices. I could, for example, decide to move out of London where I could barely afford to pay my rent, and where the noise, the overwhelmingness of everything, the expense, the proximity to my father, were all increasing my anxiety, my depression and my suicidal thoughts. Which isn’t to say that I don’t love London or didn’t love living in London any more than it is to say that I don’t love my dad. Nor is it to say that moving will “cure” me. But circumstances, cities and people all change. Life is all about change. And sometimes the thing to do when everything changes is to change with it. Which is why, in September this year, my partner and I left London and moved to Lancaster, where the air is clear; where you can see the stars; where you can hear silence; where we can struggle to pay less rent, and struggle whilst living in a nicer home; and where my dad doesn’t live.

A wave is a nonverbal communication gesture that consists of the movement of the hand and/or entire arm that people commonly use to greet each other but can also be used to say goodbye, merely acknowledge another’s presence, call for silence, or deny someone.

In the year or so before we left London, I still saw my dad pretty regularly, but it became a weekly visit rather than the daily visit I was used to. I still did various things for him when I could. I still tried to talk to him, going through the same repetitive conversations (many of which are documented in the previous pieces). The most frequent conversations he instigated were still about how he wanted to die. I went with him to some hospital appointments. Other members of the family became the ones who saw him more regularly. We also had two people coming in to provide various forms of care. Seeing him became harder for me to process in some ways because he wasn’t always in my mind, so when I saw him, when we had the same circular conversations, it hit me more, the distance between who he had been and who he was now, the distance between the connection and safety I had always found within our relationship and the disconnection and confusion that had replaced it. We knew we loved each other, but we both missed the friendship we once had, which now existed only in memory — or in the memory of a memory — or didn’t exist at all. You can’t have a conversation when you aren’t both really there. I could listen to him telling me things he’d already told me. Or he could listen to me telling him things that confused and worried him. I would have to explain so many things within a sentence that I didn’t really remember what it had been about either by the time I’d reached the end. Sometimes we would have moments that would almost be like the way things had been, and then they would disappear. Once he said to me, “I always enjoyed your life,” which made me cry because it was true, and because it was in the past tense. He couldn’t even understand my life now, let alone enjoy it.

Ocean waves are surface waves that occur on the free surface of bodies of water.

He was, and is, continuing on in his journey into the fog. I used to run baby rhyme time sessions, and seeing babies every week, I would see their development in relation to how they had been the week before. I always imagined it like a flick book where they were growing older in big jumps between each page, whereas for their parents who saw them all the time, their development was a constant process, always there, but because of that it, was sometimes harder for them to notice the speed of the change. Changing how frequently I saw my dad worked the same way. I was constantly surprised by who he was that week in comparison to who he’d been the week before.

Two kinds of large-scale atmospheric waves within the lower atmosphere exist: internal waves with finite vertical wavelengths which can transport wave energy upward; and external waves with infinitely large wavelengths which cannot transport wave energy.

He told me that he’d been to a dementia screening at the cinema and that it had annoyed him. I asked him why, and he said that he’d sat there waiting for the talk about dementia to start, but instead, he’d been offered tea and coffee. No one had seemed to be listening to him, and no one seemed to know when the talk was happening. So he’d grown annoyed and left. After going through this with me a few times, I looked up the screening and explained to him that there the dementia screening was designed for people with dementia to watch old films that might chime with their memories. They had been giving people tea and coffee as refreshments in advance of the screening. There was never supposed to be a talk about dementia.

Brainwaves, are rhythmic or repetitive patterns of neural activity in the central nervous system.

A few months earlier, he might have found this mistake funny, but now he couldn’t understand the joke. He remained locked into his original analysis of the situation. He couldn’t adapt to the reality of it. I explained it again, and he still didn’t understand. I explained it a few more times, but as he was becoming more distressed and confused with each explanation, I gave up. The next time I visited, he’d forgotten about the whole thing.

A transverse wave is a moving wave that consists of oscillations occurring perpendicular (right angled) to the direction of energy transfer (or the propagation of the wave).

Some time after that, I brought him his monthly shopping order. Tesco had stopped doing their own brand version of his regular skin cream, and so instead they’d supplied E45. I explained to him what had happened and that it was the same cream he always got. I got on with putting the rest of the shopping away, and heard him open the fridge behind me. He’d taken the cream from the bathroom where I’d put it and was putting it in the fridge. I asked him why, and he said it was cream. I explained that the cream wasn’t for eating but was for dry skin. He seemed to understand. I put the cream back in the bathroom. A few minutes later, he was trying to put it in the fridge again. We went over and over it, and eventually he seemed to understand. I put a note on the top of the container to remind him.

Wave–particle duality is the concept in quantum mechanics that every particle or quantic entity may be partly described in terms not only of particles, but also of waves. It expresses the inability of the classical concepts “particle” or “wave” to fully describe the behavior of quantum-scale objects.

A while later, I was at his house when he brought out some cigarettes and we smoked together. After we’d finished, we talked and finished drinking our tea. He suddenly jumped up and grabbed the packet of cigarettes off the table and threw them into the bin, shaking his head and tutting. I jumped up myself to retrieve the packet, and asked him why he’d done that. After a confused bit of conversation, I discovered that he’d read the SMOKING KILLS label on the front and thought it was anti-smoking junk mail that had somehow got onto his table. It took him a while to understand that the packaging of cigarettes has changed from when he used to smoke, but at least this time I could show him physically that he was wrong.

Internal waves are gravity waves that oscillate within a fluid medium, rather than on its surface.

The thing about making choices is that you have to be able to understand them in order to make them. Increasingly, my dad has been getting to a point where he can’t look after himself. But he isn’t always aware of that. He asks for more help than he used to, but he often doesn’t always understand what help he needs. Because of this, and because three of his children were now going to be living in the North of England, we started to look at assisted living facilities in Yorkshire and Lancashire: places where he could go for regular, safe and contained country walks; where there would be people keeping an eye on him but still allowing him some independence. One reason for this change in his circumstances is the choice I made to leave London. As I write this piece, he is trying out a place for three weeks to see if he likes it. I’ve been receiving reports from my brother and my sister via email. Those daily reports remind me of the experience I had when I visited him every day. One day he is happy and excited to be there; the next day he is depressed and can’t really remember why he’s there at all. In some ways, I think that wherever he is, he won’t be able to be fully happy, because wherever he is, he will still have dementia. He will still be gradually losing himself. I wonder if, when he has lost enough of himself, he will be able to stop fighting it, relax into his new state of being — whatever that is — and enjoy whatever pleasures still make sense to him.

Longitudinal waves are waves in which the displacement of the medium is in the same direction as, or the opposite direction to, the direction of propagation of the wave.

My partner and I left London at different times because our Lancaster rental started when I still had lots of work to do in London. I stayed on for a couple of weeks in a shell of a flat with no furniture, and she came to Lancaster to start settling into our new life. It wasn’t ideal, and both of us would have preferred to move together, but we made the best choice that we could under the circumstances.

Gravity waves are waves generated in a fluid medium or at the interface between two media when the force of gravity or buoyancy tries to restore equilibrium.

Before she left, we went round to see my dad. In the middle of our conversation, he suddenly pointed at the printer next to his computer and asked us what it was — he remembered it was something he used to use a lot. It took us quite some time to work out that he was asking about his own printer. We explained it was a printer and what a printer was. But he still seemed confused.

A surface wave is a mechanical wave that propagates along the interface between differing media.

The penultimate time I saw my dad before I left London, I found him in a stress. He was glaring at his computer, which had Amazon open on its screen. He told me he had been trying to listen to music by Paul Robeson but that “it” wouldn’t let him. He’d filmed Paul Robeson for a coal board documentary and has loved his singing ever since. It took me a while to work out what he was trying to do, and I realised the issue was that he’d forgotten his password. He always makes his passwords incredibly hard to remember because he’s paranoid about these things, which has become more and more of a problem the worse his memory has become. But he keeps them all in a typed up printout that lives under his computer. Just as he had forgotten what a printer was, he had forgotten what a password was. He didn’t understand what I was doing at all. Perhaps he would have understood better if he’d been in a calmer mood; he may have been more confused because he was panicking. But luckily, the password he’d recorded as his Amazon password (unlike many of the passwords in that book) still worked. I ordered him some CDs. I left him happy that he would be hearing Robeson again soon. I’d offered to bring up Robeson on YouTube so he wouldn’t have to wait, but that had confused him, and he was happy about the CDs being ordered, so I left it at that. I really hoped that when the CDs came, he’d understand what they were.

Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum longer than infrared light.

The last time I saw my dad before I left London, we sat and talked for a while. He seemed more aware than he often was, less confused by everything. I sat with him for a long time, talking about Lancaster and how I wouldn’t be leaving for a few days, but this was the last time I would be able to see him. When I said goodbye, we hugged for a long time and told each other we loved each other. I started crying, and I couldn’t stop. I kissed him on the forehead and buried myself into his shoulder, taking him in, the feel of him against me, his smell, remembering so many other times we had hugged, back when we’d both been previous versions of ourselves. I walked back to my skeleton flat still crying. At least we have loved each other. At least we have shared as much as we have for as long as we have. The tears were the hot kind that build up behind your eyes like a wave and then break out and flood your cheeks, the cleansing kind of tears that leave you feeling washed out when the waves stop breaking. They have returned to me in exactly the same form as I have been writing this paragraph. They are familiar and safe, the way my dad always was. They are overpowering like death and age and dementia. They are sadness and love and memory and time. And they wash away, like everything eventually does.

Seismic waves are waves of energy that travel through the Earth’s layers, and are a result of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, magma movement, large landslides and large man-made explosions that give out low-frequency acoustic energy.

On the day I left London, I struggled through the tube carrying a ridiculous amount of stuff. When I finally got to my seat on the train, I relaxed finally. I was excited to be starting something new and looking forward to being with my partner again. I looked at my phone, and I had a text message from my niece that started with her saying she had noticed from Facebook that I had left and ended with: “Just got a question about granddad. I’m about to drop his tea up to him and when I spoke to him he said you are coming to say goodbye… I don’t really know what to say to him. Maybe you could give him a call.”

The waving of the hand has multiple variables and styles of performing the gesture. The common waving of the hand to mean “hello” or “goodbye” is done by moving the hand side to side, however there are more than one form of waving; each form having its own meaning.

That last goodbye, where I had cried those tidal waves of tears and told him all the things I want him to know for always, had been forgotten. Worse than that, he was still expecting that goodbye to happen. He was looking forward to something we’d already shared. But had we shared it? Had he understood at the time and forgotten? Or had he not understood at the time? Every time he says goodbye now, he makes sure to tell me how much he loves me and how much I have meant to him. I’m pretty sure he does that with everyone. Just in case. In case he dies, but also in case this is the last time he will remember himself enough to be able to say it: repeating the mantra to try and bring it back, or at least to not lose it.

Wind waves have a certain amount of randomness: subsequent waves differ in height, duration, and shape with limited predictability.

When all memory goes, can love remain? I hope it can.

The Love wave is a result of the interference of many shear waves guided by an elastic layer, which is welded to an elastic half space on one side while bordering a vacuum on the other side.

But no matter what he forgets, it can’t take away the love we have shared, that existed, and will always have existed, even when he has forgotten it; even when he is no longer alive to remember it; even when I have forgotten it; even when I am no longer alive to remember it. It happened. And that has to be enough.

* All italics taken from descriptions of different waves on Wikipedia. No edits made to Wikipedia quotes (although sometimes, according to my editor, they are not punctuated correctly.)

This is part of a collection of essays. Click here to read the introduction.

Read part 10 here: