Minotomony pt.2

When my grandfather, Thomas (Tommy to those who knew him) passed away after a lengthy battle with dementia, my mother found his diaries in his house. What you have just read is a reimagining of those diaries, an attempt to illustrate the degradation of the man I knew. The actual diaries mostly contained everyday information on jobs that needed to be done, or had been completed. Possibly the workings of a retired man, trying to hold on to some semblance of a routine, or possibly an attempt to hold onto some sanity, in the face of a disease rearing its ugly head. I always remembered his garage being very cluttered and full of all kinds of things imaginable. As a child, I was always struck by his ability to find things amid the mass of chaos. It was not a large garage, and his paranoia about thieves coming for his car, meant that he stored it in the garage each night. As a result, the abundance of tools, books, picture frames, biscuit tins, indoor furniture, outdoor furniture and anything else you would ever expect to find in a garage (or anywhere else) had to be crammed into tiny spaces and compacted against the wall. There were two motorbikes in there, buried under the detritus. Even as an old man he used to go out riding his motorbike. He once managed to evade a speeding ticket when the police officer was highly amused at the sight of Tommy’s aged face, upon removal of his helmet. Imagine the shock of a would-be thief when he managed to force entry into the garage, only to be greeted by the world’s best stocked garage sale. It is true that Tommy was woken up, just to look out of the window and see half of the garage’s contents strewn over the lawn. It is also true that Tommy went down and tried to accost the intruder with a walking stick. He told me that he had yelled “You bastard!” at him as he attempted to remove the young man’s head from his shoulders with his stick. Though, I was not present when this happened, and my memory of the regaling of the story is somewhat hazy, distorted by time and the endless revisions it brings. Is the story I remember any more true than the one with which we started?

It is also true, that as my grandfather’s illness gradually developed, my grandmother’s mobility was greatly reduced, and the stairs in their house (which were notoriously steep) became unassailable. I am uncertain at this point how recognisable the dementia was becoming, but as time wore on, Tommy did assert that there was a man living upstairs in the house. I cannot remember what Tommy’s rationalisation was for the mysterious presence. Life is full of the stories we tell ourselves and others. Each new story gets added to the rest. Chapters become books, books become shelves, shelves become bookcases and eventually, bookcases become our own private library in our heads. Every encounter and experience we have is carefully curated and added to the others. People become characters in the great stories of our lives. Our sense of self is based on the lessons learnt from our cerebral libraries. Is Dementia a thief? Cruelly stealing the stories that line the shelves of our libraries? Or is it a barricade? Not allowing new stories to take their logical place amongst the ones that define us. So that your perceptions become so disconnected from reality, that you end up living with an uncatchable bull-man in your back bedroom?