It is very tough. Even though one is tired and even though the Government recognises this and had instituted a programme of respite care, giving both the cared for and the carer two weeks away from each other every two months, it is still very hard. When one’s mother doesn’t wish to go, says she wants to die at home, doesn’t like being with other people and is genuinely scared and all one wants to do is sleep and not have the stresses of her illness on your shoulders for a while, it is crippling.
The intervention of a third party to explain the situation and try to coax her into respite care for two weeks helps and doesn’t help. For though she agreed, on the drive to the nursing home she said she only agreed because she did not want to lose her son. And that is not emotional blackmail, she means it. Everyone she loved betrayed or left her and life has left her with a broken body, and one other human being to make her tea. And despite all the arguing it is nowhere simple to leave one’s mother lying in a bed in a large room by a window with two caring, friendly strangers and know she will wake up in the morning and she won’t see the one person she really wants to see with her one good eye, nor hear the one voice she most treasure through her her partially deaf ears.