How I ended up here.

Sarah was my great Aunt. She was said to have been a beauty in her youth. It was long before the age where size zero was considered remotely ideal. She had been buxom and stately with long golden hair and a strong square jaw. It must have been true because Sarah had been quite a girl. She had been married to a distant member of the Royal family, quite a leap for a Lancashire mill girl. She was widowed young, I remember her telling me about how God had taken her two little sons, both born too soon. One had lived for a few days and she had used a shoe box to put him in because he was so tiny. Could that have been true? At any rate, Lyle followed his sons to an early grave and in due course Sarah ran away to live with a married man. My grandfather and his brother were reputed to have found her after consulting a Ouija board about her whereabouts and she somehow ended up back in her home town. Did her brothers bring her home or did she come back spurned and needing help? So much of family history becomes a story with pages missing, I know the broad strokes but so much is lost with the people who have now gone.
When I first remember Sarah I was about five and she was already in her early eighties. She was an imposing figure, her once golden hair was white but it was still long enough for her to sit on. She wore it in a long plait curled up to make a bun. She was a large woman with one of those bosoms that make a shelf, she used to balance her side plate on it to catch crumbs when she ate the cakes she loved so much. Sarah was a curious mixture of refinement and typical mill girl. She crooked her little finger when she drank from a tea cup but she loved Mackeson stout and got through plenty of it. She lived in a little terraced house and looked down on her neighbours while realising it wasn't the done thing to show it. I got into trouble for laughing when we stood at the front door and she waved and smiled to a neighbour across the road while saying sotto voce "silly old cow!" She hated old age, railed against the fact she needed any help. My father resolutely went round each evening, standing in the street to protect her sensibilities and then shouting through the letter box to see that she was alright and safely into bed. He went each morning and laid her fire and made breakfast. He arranged meals on wheels, she hated them, called them "muck on a truck" but she submitted to them because it meant she stayed in her little house.
Every Thursday evening my parents brought her to our house for tea and she always brought me a chocolate digestive biscuit wrapped in silver foil. She was reputed to have smelled like a pole cat but I don't remember that. I remember her whiskers when she kissed me, I remember her demanding a brandy as it was "good for my stomach" or a whisky because it was "good for my bones". Most of all I remember her claiming to be psychic. She used to tell my father that his mother was in the room and was smiling at him. My father used to try to gloss over it but she would insist and would tell us all her messages from beyond the grave. I was too young to identify the odd atmosphere in the room but, looking back, it was pure embarrassment.
I don't remember how Sarah ended up in hospital when I was about ten. I do remember being taken to visit her after a long campaign where I stormed and cried because I wanted to see her. She was in a long stay geriatric ward. It was hell. A long room with beds down each side and a linoleum floor, the noise of wailing and screaming greeted us as we came through the swing doors. I can see it now, Sarah was in a bed near the bottom on the left hand side. I remember being surprised when my parents slowed down because I didn't recognise her. She was tiny, all the bulk was gone and she couldn't have been more than six stone. Someone had cut off her long plait and her hair stood up in a crazy halo around her shrunken face. She didn't know me, she thought I was my Aunt but she gripped my hand and her eyes filled with tears as she talked to me of a picnic she thought we had gone on. She asked me how old she was and I said "eighty six". "Eighty six?" she said in bewilderment "Then my mother must be dead!" and she filled up again with tears. I looked at my father, waited for him to explode at someone, to remove her from this hell hole, to make some sense of this insanity but he didn't seem to see anything wrong with the situation. We stayed for about half an hour, trying to make sense of her rambling, trying to make conversation with this shell of Sarah who was living in a time long gone and all of the time the wails and screams echoed off the distempered walls from the beds around us.
The bell for the end of visiting rang and we stood up to go. Sarah grasped my hand tightly as my parents started to walk away. She pulled me close and said urgently "They hit me you know, if I wet the bed, they hit me!" I told my parents but they dismissed it as the fantasy of a dying mind. They said Sarah was being looked after well and the nurses were kind people doing a hard job in difficult circumstances.
Every now and then I wonder how I ended up in this crazy job with it's stress and frustration. Then I remember Sarah....and I don't wonder any more.