I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
’Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

Endings. She takes the hand of the carer in the home and walks back to the salon. I wait for her to turn her head, for a sign that she knows I am there and that there is a connection, a memory, a trace of the love that is lost. But nothing. The carer’s hand and my hand might just as well be the same. Fate is pulling its final strings.

She needs to be hand-fed now and walking is a battle as she holds on to anything for dear life: a table, a hand, a banister, for fear, perhaps, of falling. She puts the wrong end of the fork into her mouth and drops food onto the table or her lap. Turns the pages of a travel magazine with glass eyes that seem to see nothing. And goes to sleep at the first opportunity. I sit there and hold her hand as her head lowers little by little onto the tabletop.

Of course – no speech. That is what semantic dementia means. No idea of what she may be thinking or indeed if she is thinking at all. What is it to be zoon logon if there is no logon? When she says a couple of words that seem to make sense, does she know it? I go every day and we walk, weather providing, to the gate and back and then sit in the extension and listen to some arias she always liked on the mobile. No sign that she is hearing anything. Then inside to wait for tea as the other visitors arrive little by little and sit with their inmates (s that the right word?) After a couple of hours I leave as they take her in to sleep more comfortably amongst all the other sleepers.

You get to know them little by little. The fighting mother in her wheelchair who is shuttled off to hospital for antibiotics against a urine infection as the nappies they all wear make this all but inevitable. The mother with her repeated grunts whose son comes Saturdays and Tuesdays after an hour’s drive and feeds her delicacies from plastic containers. The little group who play cards. The daughter who sings nursery rhymes to her father reversing the generations. The three or four who gather outside the main door for a smoke. The man who seems to have taken it upon himself to push the wheelchairs around. Lives and lives.

And back in the empty house where the loneliness is palpable. The daily routine keeps the body moving around but it moves like an automaton which could switch itself off at any moment. I wake with a sense of her presence which is sucked away into a kind of echo that hovers in those first few moments of consciousness. Nietzsche writes,‘ I have no one to whom I feel related, as little among the living as among the dead. This is unimaginably terrifying. Only constant exercise in learning how to bear this feeling […] enables me to comprehend how I have not as yet perished on account of it’ and he continues, ‘the task for which I live confronts me clearly; it is a factum of unimaginable sadness, albeit transfigured by the consciousness that there I greatness in it, if ever greatness dwells in a mortal’s task’. (and thanks to David Krell for this translation).

So, what would you do in these circumstances? Wait for the wheelchair and the forced feeding? And all the rest? The empty space in the bed next to me cries out for an answer. No calls this evening just the dark beyond the windows and the clouds. flying off beyond all the horizons of the world.