Honouring Dad in Lewisham

The kettle clicks off at six-fifteen. Outside, the rain is the fine London kind that never quite falls and never quite stops. A bus hisses past on the high road. Marcia butters two slices of hard-dough bread, cuts them into triangles the way her father likes, and carries a tray into the front room where he sits by the window in his cardigan.

“Morning, Dad.” He looks up and smiles politely. It is the smile he gives to strangers. Some mornings he knows her. Some mornings he calls her by her late mother's name, Gloria. Some mornings, like this one, he does not know who she is at all.

Her father, Winston, came to London from Kingston in 1962. He drove a bus on the number 36 route for thirty years. He sang tenor in the church choir and never missed a Test match on the radio. Now he is eighty-seven, and the dementia takes a little more of him every month.

Marcia moved back into the family house two years ago. She works part-time from the kitchen table now. She does his tablets, his meals, his washing, the appointments at the memory clinic. Her brother lives in Birmingham and phones on Sundays. Her own daughter is at university. Marcia loves her father. She is also exhausted, and some nights she is angry, and then she feels guilty for being angry.

The social worker has mentioned a care home, gently, twice. Each time, Marcia has felt something close to shame. She was raised on the Ten Commandments. “Honour thy father and thy mother.” Surely honour means keeping him at home. Surely it means her.

One evening, after he was asleep, she read the commandment again, slowly, at the kitchen table. It does not say how. It does not say alone. Honour, in the old sense, means to give weight. To treat someone as heavy with worth. She thought about what that looked like. It looked like protecting his dignity. Making sure he was safe and clean and listened to. It did not necessarily look like her doing every single thing until she broke.

She asked her pastor about it, a little defensively. He said honouring your parents can include asking for help so that you can keep loving them well. He said Jesus himself, on the cross, made sure his mother would be cared for by someone else.

So Marcia did some hard things. She phoned her brother and asked him, plainly, to come one weekend a month. He agreed, after a pause. She took up the offer of a day centre twice a week, where her father plays dominoes and the staff call him Mr Winston. They are visiting care homes together now, slowly, with no decision yet.

Nothing about it is tidy. Some days she still feels she is failing him. Some days he is frightened and she cannot comfort him. The commandment has not made it easy. It has made it clearer.

And there are still moments. Last week she put on an old hymn while she folded washing, and from the front room, in a cracked tenor, her father began to sing along. Every word. She stood in the doorway and listened until the end, and then she sat down beside him and held his hand. He did not know her name. But he squeezed her hand, and that was honour enough for one evening.