I can’t bring myself to move my mother ‘down south’ – it would mean saying goodbye to my childhood

The light is getting bigger at the end of the Covid tunnel. Since being jabbed more than two weeks ago, I have been busy ticking off lots of “first time since March 2020” events. These include galleries, restaurants, going on public transport, having friends in the house, cinema and theatre.

I have also been back up north to visit my mother in her nursing home; a journey which took eight hours – complete with an AA drama which, mercifully, coincided with a lunch stop on the M6 toll road. Given the choice, Norton Canes is a fine service station at which to grind to a halt, because it has a Leon – and if you’re going to spend 90 minutes waiting for the third emergency service, then I can heartily recommend spending some of that time scoffing a paprika chicken and roast veg box. I digress.

A lot of people question why my mother is in a nursing home in Lancashire, when her three children live down south?

Well, June became very forgetful in the autumn of last year, after a fall in her flat on the Fylde coast. Suddenly she couldn’t really remember where her own bathroom was, or whether it was Monday morning or teatime on Tuesday.

After several days of struggling to deal with her confusion in the middle of a pandemic – and hoping it might be a “tiny stroke”, from which she could recover – my brother phoned the nursing home where my father spent the last four years before his death, and they offered her a room.

The home is a mile from her old flat. It’s more or less opposite the grammar school my sister and I attended, and round the corner from her 95-year-old sister’s bungalow.

The fact that it is more than 250 miles from where we all live wasn’t something we really thought about. Having visited frequently to see our father, we knew the staff and the owners; we knew how kind they are and how safe she would be, a fact borne out by the home not incurring a single Covid-related death in the last 15 months.

For us, the pandemic oddly made it easier to accept June’s fate. It was obviously the safest place for her to be and we bagsied that room. At the time, no one was able to visit relatives in care homes wherever they were, so the fact hers was so far away didn’t really make any difference: lockdown is lockdown.

Now the rules have relaxed and she is allowed visitors, so we must travel – and the idea of moving her closer to London rolls around in that bit of my brain that is on full alert at 3am.

Apart from the distance being a tad inconvenient, there are many reasons why I want my mother to stay where she is. As the anniversary of her dramatic loss of independence rolls around, I know that it has taken the staff months to make her feel secure.

Although she occasionally thinks she lives in various other places – including hotels in Paris – there is a hard-earned muscle memory that takes her to the dining room and TV lounge, and she has stopped roaming the corridors at night. She eats well and enjoys the Wednesday film club, although listening to her recount the plot of a film whose title she can’t remember can be quite a trip!

More importantly, there are members of staff who still remember my father, Derek. They also know all the names of her children and grandchildren, and her sister can visit. My mother’s relationship with her sister is one of the things that makes me cry about this situation – they love each other deeply, and the idea of them never seeing each other again is horrific. One day this will happen, I know. It’s inevitable – but it doesn’t bear thinking about right now.

I think the three of us, her children, are also clinging to our own past. “Up north” is where everything was once so “normal”, and it really doesn’t feel very long ago. Sometimes, even now, it’s easy to persuade yourself that it might be possible to turn the clock back; that June could appear in the kitchen of her flat preparing supper like before. Before the coronavirus, before dementia. After all, she was fine at the beginning of 2020 – how did everything go wrong so quickly?

If we move my mother down south, we will be cutting our ties with the area where the three of us grew up – there would be no reason to go back. We wouldn’t have any excuse to sit in the cafe where my mother met her friends; or walk through the piazza where my father rode his mobility scooter with one hand, ice cream in the other. A big chunk of our past and our parents’ history would be consigned to memory. It’s a strange one. I have no wish to ever live there again and neither do my siblings, but I don’t think any of us feel ready to say goodbye to the place for good.