So today for the first time since she moved to the new home, I didn’t go to see her. There is a gale blowing outside and a deluge with it. The road outside our house is a river and I am advised not to travel. There is a red alert out for the whole of Galicia. The guilt is there nonetheless. It is ever present. There is always more you feel you could do even if there isn’t. The puppet that pulls our strings has finally dragged us apart and the agony of waiting is palpable.

What to say? She has ended up in a home although I swore that I would never let this happen and now at six o’clock after each visit I leave her to drive home to an empty house. Ten minutes can be an eternity.

The first home would not do: too far to travel every day. Every time I went she was sitting half asleep in front of the television, only the one room: both sitting and dining, out in the middle of nowhere, 45 minutes in the car to get there. Nobody who went to visit her there liked it.

So instead of coming back home with me and carrying on as before she was moved to another, bigger setup in the hills above Aldan, a little town 10 minutes away with its own ria which leads of the Ria de Pontevedra. Its closeness means I can visit daily which until now I have been doing. This makes for a very depressing routine in which I move between two alien spaces: l. It is strange how loneliness can vary: on the one hand is the house in Beluso which gapes with its own kind emptiness and echoes with silence, the other the care home which is crowded with people enveloped in their individual imaginings. The former is no longer home in any meaningful sense of the word and the other likewise although they call it a home. It is in its own way a prison full of lifers although quite a luxurious one. You can see what you think, the website is here

Each afternoon I visit a kind of purgatory inhabited by fallen angels or at least fallen human beings who move around each in his or her own little world. The zombie lifers. As far as Lucia is concerned, I am no longer even sure it matters that I am there, that she has any notion where she is or who I am, although I cannot take the risk that she doesn’t. I should have had the strength to bring her home and continue as before but the fate that pulls our strings took over again and there she is. Maybe it is for the best although the house is hugely hollow and I seem to be filling my days with a series of nothings, wasting time bet ween visits. I was persuaded that it is for the best, that I can no longer take care of her here, that the care would be too uncertain. Carers in the rural are few and far between and she needs reliability.

A covid story for the strong hearted. During the whole of the epidemic a husband came and sat outside while his wife was brought inside to the glass partitions and they sat there a few feet apart for a couple of hours every day. After the crisis was over the receptionist asked him why he came as she had no idea who he was and he answered; I didn’t do it for her sake but for mine.  Well, I think I am somewhat the same. I need those hours holding her hand even as she slowly goes to sleep beside me. It refreshes what is left of my half dead soul.