For Dementia Awareness Week
This week (from 17th – 23 May) in the UK it is Dementia Awareness Week.
Some of you will know that I worked for Alzheimer’s society until I retired a couple of years ago.
I would like to acknowledge the work of the society and to contribute to Dementia Awareness Week by posting ‘something different for me’: a short sketch each day called
“All in a days work”
These are not remembered stories but real events I wrote up a long time ago right after the visit/phone call.
As support workers we had excellent support in the office but on the rare occasion I couldn’t get there after I finished a visit or I was alone in the office I used to write down my thoughts and feelings and let the paper listen.
An Artistic Life.
The lady of the house is an artist and book collector and has memory loss.
She lives on the top floor of a fabulous Victorian house now converted into 6 flats. My lady’s flat has three double bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom and sitting room.
The sitting room is easily 18ft square with two enormous sash windows over looking the bay. It is utterly delightful. My lady has lived alone in the flat for the past 15 years.
Every wall in every room has been shelved out to accommodate her book collection. The books, once beautifully arranged in rows as in a library have had to accommodate more books now lying flat on top of them.
Small books gather dust in front of taller books. Postcards gather in small gaps between books. On narrow shelves photographs stand precariously in front of books.
In the sitting room a huge, once loved dining table is piled high with magazines and their free classical music CD’s carefully removed and stacked 15 high. Not an inch of the once polished tabletop is visible.
On the floor leaning against the walls and themselves are the paintings she has done over a lifetime. They are stacked as if in storage in a warehouse. They line three of the walls in the sitting room.
Each bedroom is identically filled with her books and paintings. Her bedroom houses her now unused easel and paints alongside her single bed. Her dressing table mirror is hung with strings of beads, necklaces and bracelets.
It is like Aladdin’s cave, full to the brim of lovely things as her collecting has encompassed the pretty artefacts she is unable to resist in the equally pretty shops in her town.
Even the once large Victorian hallway is lined with bookcases, the top shelves of which are too tall to reach and each bookcase is now full to tipping.
It is a fire hazard of course.
