Whose reality is it anyway?

My mum used to be one of the most practical, down to earth people I knew. She now lives in a completely different world to the rest of us. This manifests itself in many different ways. At a very basic everyday level she is completely baffled as to the whereabouts of toilets. She will ask quietly, “Is there a toilet I can use here?” This happens in both the flat and the house we have been living in for two years now.  Once pointed in the right direction, she is fine.  That is her reality. 

The TV and the DVD merge in her world in rather bizarre ways.  She has no clue about their differences.  Despite carrying around the DVD South Pacific in her bag everywhere, when I ask her if she wants to watch it, she will invariably say, “Oh, is it on the TV now?” The sailors in HMS Pinafore, which she watches on DVD as she loves the music of Gilbert and Sullivan, reappear a day later when she spots a tanker out at sea in Galle and remarks, “Oh that’ll be where the men sing and dance at night.”  

If characters on TV can be transferred to the real world, it also works the other way round.  The sprawling mansion and grounds of the family house in the series Revenge becomes the Fortress. “There’s that place we go,” she exclaims when she sees it on TV.  When Wimbledon was on last summer, there was a clip of the Queen at a previous event shown repeatedly throughout the week of tennis.  This was proof to my mum that the Queen was in attendance throughout the tournament.  She always remarks on how well my Aunt Margaret (in reality someone who looks like her)  looks  in the audience of one of the Viennese Andre Rieu concert’s  even though part of her knows she passed away a while back.  

Then there’s confusion of place and time. The outskirts of Colombo are pretty consistently Motherwell and Wishaw. She often wants to get on a bus and go and see Flora in Edinburgh.  All high apartment blocks are the JAIC Hilton which I went up one day for a work meeting. This obviously impressed her as she comments on them all by asking me if I was up that one.  Then there’s the neon sign that you can see from my apartment window in the evening. It says “Pearl Hotel”. She remarks, “Oh that’s that garage over there.” This confuses me because I’m not aware she has ever lived anywhere where you could see a garage from the window and certainly not one called the Pearl Hotel.  Then there’s the ‘tennis courts’ in Galle Fort. Every time we are in Galle Fort she will remark on how we are about to see the tennis courts where people play. She is right in that they do look like they have been tennis courts at some point in their history but never have I seen anyone actually playing there. 

Then there’s the things she sees but I just don’t. In the morning we look out over the balcony in Colombo and I see a few buildings, the sea and the some birds soaring over the trees. My mum sees a classroom of children on a rooftop being taught, she presumes, by (these days) two men in black. There was only one for a time but now there seems to be two. She worries about the kids when it rains. The only thing I can see that could remotely be interpreted in this way is a rooftop with a couple of large black water tanks and the tops of some smaller ones.  When we are down south just off the highway and facing the sea just before turning left for Unawatuna, she invariably sees three boats on the horizon regardless of how many boats there actually are. These are three rock formations to the right. This prompted me when she first came over to get her eyes tested but even with the right glasses she still sees the three rocks as boats.

Then there’s her possessiveness, her insecurity and paranoia. A napkin in a restaurant belongs to her, not the restaurant. We now have quite a collection.  Her bag is a constant source of worry as are her watch and glasses. They must never be left anywhere unsafe. This translates into anywhere that is not on her body or in her bag. Everyone (even when nobody is anywhere near) wants to steal her bag, glasses and watch. They must be protected at all costs and hidden frequently.  Even when she is going for a shower every morning, the glasses and watch must be placed hidden on her bed side cabinet just in case someone steals them. I have given up telling her there is no one else in the apartment apart from us. Then of course she does not remember where she put them and then they do become lost (or stolen in her reality).  

It’s a bit of a steep learning curve. You need to know which reality you are in to keep up with her. Otherwise you could get dreadfully confused.