It has been not quite a month since I last went to see her. I wasn't taking her communion this time - it was just an opportunity to check on her as I won't have the chance to do so for a couple of weeks, and communication any other way than face-to-face is complicated. Not unexpectedly conversation included the frustrations and hazards of disability. Harriet has live-in care now, something a lot of us would struggle with: is it more of a strain to have someone living in your house, or to move to a different setting to be looked after, and lose your familiar surroundings? At least her current carer seems to care: she's had two in quick succession who didn't. I sit, with an unexpected slice of cake, and find myself just as unexpectedly angry at the thought of an ill person taking the dramatic step of having a stranger come to live with them, and then finding that stranger is cruel or careless. At least Harriet has others to speak for her, and can speak for herself: others don't.
'It's a pain to be asked fifteen times in a day whether I want to go to the toilet', Harriet admitted. She struggled with her cake and dropped bits repeatedly. There is a little part of me that wants to offer to help, but I don't. I say how, when a thought pops into my mind, I try to reflect that the same thought has probably occurred to everyone else who's interacted that day with whoever it is I'm talking to, and so I don't need to say it. Harriet struggled with her cake, perhaps, but she got there in the end. The problem was not her ability to manage the cake, but my embarrassment at her possibly being embarrassed at being awkward. Of course she was going to have to battle, but ultimately it was no big deal for her or me, and there was no need to try to put everything 'right', to restore a false sort of normality. This is Harriet's normal, one she manages with fortitude.
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