It’s very upsetting to visit my grandma every day, in the home which will – in all likelihood – be the place she finishes out her life, only to see her fade away, both physically and mentally. It hasn’t taken long, but it has been decisive. She’s ninety-two. She’s had a good life. What she has now isn’t much of anything. Maybe I should have been prepared, but these things tend to catch you while you’re sleeping.

She told me today that it was sad that my great uncle has dementia, and that he can’t get out the way he used to, and how sometimes he doesn’t even recognise his own family anymore. You see, he’s been that way for a couple of years. He’s over a decade younger than she is. I said I agreed with her. She told me he just kind of exists in his own little world, inside his head, and I agreed with that too. But I told her the good thing is that he probably doesn’t realise these things are happening to him though, and she nodded.

And then she called me John.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the irony.