Nana

Seriously, if this being linked to Facebook is boring you, please tell me. Apparently you can remove me from your newsfeed, but I haven't worked out how. And I don't want to be mass de-newsfeeded.

My Nana is disappearing in slow motion. Week on week, it's easy to doubt one's perceptions that there's any real deterioration: when people ask how she is, we all shrug and say "ah you know, no change". But there is a change.

Days after she had her stroke, nearly a year ago now, I visited her in the ICU with my brother, my sister and my aunt. She was spaced out and plugged into various tubes and machines, but she was unmistakably herself. Her face drooped on the right hand side in that characteristic strokey way, but she smiled, she grasped our hands willingly, and responded to us with recognition in her eyes. We took this as the baseline from which she would recover. Instead, she's receded ever further away from that point.

There's a story about Nana's gradual devastation, my experience of the last 10 months in which I've watched tiny changes erode imperceptibly at her presence; this story is gentle and horrible, and shocking when you reduce it to a single sentence: A severe stroke left us uncertain whether Nana would speak again, 10 months later she is drooped and silent in a chair in a nursing home, barely able to open her eyes, and completely incapable of any speech or movement.

There is also another story, about my family's unexceptional experience at the hands of care services in this state, both public and private. I don't know if I want to engage in Joe Duffy-ish bile against the health service. I don't for a second think that if we lived in Sweden, Nana would be back to her old self, driving her friends to cards every other night and muscling to the front at funeral processions. The stroke that hit Nana before Christmas last year wiped out a lot of her cranial functions. But I feel that as a family, we - most especially my aunt, Nana's primary carer - have been treated with indifference and disdain. And really, is it necessary to make such a traumatic situation even more undignified, even more insecure?

One of the things I find most difficult is the way this slow process of indignity and dependency strips away the extraordinary true memory of my Nana's 87 healthy years. I'm blogging about her for the first time, as a ruined thing; yet when I google her name it turns up about 3 valid pages of references to her in the local press. My Nana is my inspiration. And it's nobody's fault that now she's been reduced to somebody that she herself, were she in full possession of her faculties, would pity. What point is there in blame? It's all just epically, humanly cruel and tragic.

I wonder if it's wrong to blog about such an outstanding woman in such a negative way. Does it further strip away her dignity? I will redress it soon, with a post that presents her in a way she might recognise. The story doesn't begin or end with a ruined woman slumped in a chair.