Her Memory is Going

Yesterday I visited Harriet at the Retirement Home, at about five o’clock in the evening, as I do most weekends when I am around.

Her memory is now very poor. I try to explain that I will be away for a while.

She has a few framed photographs around her. One showed a little boy with blonde hair, seven or eight years old, making a funny sideways smile as if he couldn’t quite get it right when asked to say “cheese”.

This picture has been taken out of the frame now by the nurses because, they say,  she likes to hold it.

“Such a sweet child,” she says. He is dead now. She survived him.

A single tear slips down her face. “I can’t even remember his name,” she says.

I tried to explain about the Jubilee and asked her if she remembered the day King George died and the young princess became Queen.

She was about the same age as Elizabeth.

But it didn’t make any sense to her.

Sad.

She would have enjoyed the Jubilee celebrations once, but they just confused her now, I was told, by the nurse from Romania who took Harriet across the road in a wheelchair to the sports field where the celebrations were happening.