The Fragments of my Father. Sam Mills

as usual. I thought if I cooked for him it might help. I thought that rest was the answer.

      That day in September, when it first happened, I remember setting down plates on the dining-room table for lunch. My eyes skimmed a stain on the carpet. My mother had lived her last days in this room, and the stain had been created by – a spilt drink? – a splash of urine? – now faded to a watermark.

      I went into the hallway and called upstairs: ‘Dad, it’s ready!’

      Two plates on the table. The empty place where she once sat, at the head. My appetite was always sharp. Still standing, getting impatient, I speared a potato and chewed it quickly. I called to Dad again. When there was no reply, I hurried up the stairs. ‘Come in,’ his quavery voice replied to my knock. He was sitting on the bed, looking at the clothes neatly laid out next to him – trousers, braces, shirt – as though he had been given a set of bad letters at a turn in Scrabble and couldn’t make a word out of them.

      Kneeling down, I busied myself with peeling off his socks, pulling on taut crisp ones. But when I reached for his pyjama shirt, my hand paused. I hadn’t seen my dad naked since I was a child.

      ‘Why don’t you have lunch in your pyjamas?’ I suggested.

      As he lumbered down the stairs, I thought: hang on, has he even taken his morning medicines? One of our kitchen cupboards now functioned as a medicine cabinet: I found a jumble of white boxes with scientific names and labels giving instructions for doses. In the dining room, Dad sat down before his plate of cooling chicken and vegetables. I passed him his pills. Silence; stasis. I poured him a glass of water and put the pills on a spoon. I raised them to his mouth. He opened it. I slipped them in and passed him the water.

      I started to cut up his food. A piece of chicken on the end of my fork came up against his closed lips. He looked at me as though he couldn’t hear the words I was saying: Dad, it’s good to eat, you need to keep your strength up. For one surreal moment, I felt as though I was an apparition he did not believe in. When I called 999 they asked if he was breathing, if he was in pain, and I had trouble explaining his state: he seemed as though he was in a coma, yet he was awake. After I hung up, I took solace in the sound of him breathing in and out, but I could not make his eyes connect with mine. The fading light in them chilled me with a grief-flash: my mother lying in this room, on a makeshift hospital bed, the life seeping out of her. It was as though he was in a liminal state, body half-dead, mind in purgatory.

      It took eight weeks for him to heal. Due to a lack of beds at the local psychiatric hospital in Tooting, he was transferred from St Helier to Tolworth hospital, where he shared a ward with elderly patients suffering from dementia. There he was medicated and nourished back to walking, talking, speaking health and discharged for Christmas. I had assumed then that the catatonia was a blip, a one-off. Perhaps he’d just got tired, run down, needed rest. Now that it was happening all over again, I could no longer dismiss it as an anomaly. This was the start of something new, a pattern I could neither name nor explain. I thought of all the years that my mother had looked after him. Why, after decades of stability, had he collapsed again – and why into such a strange state?