Another Mans Master

(Not always recorded) Ella usually begins: Hello Richie.
We often repeat with variations, often not recorded: I love you.
An aged Ella, with life-threatening pneumonia history, will always feel the cold: It’s very cold. (In Broad Yorkshire:) It’s cawd.
Ella is a fluent (even witty) talker, despite her dementia. Her memory is sometimes jumbled. But that effect, in these transcripts, is more due to my inefficient note-taking than Ellas (vigorous) colloquial sentences.
Ellas memory myths; fabrications of what memories she can access, are fairly stable and intelligible supplies of meaning, to her bewildering losses of a sense of time and place, where and when she is. And her son and home, that the unspeakable authorities have kept her away from, could do more to make her whole again.
All our memories rest on a foundation of habit. The greater the habit, the stronger the foundation. The dementia sufferer has lost the time corrective to memories that are no longer true. And finds it harder to adjust to current realities. Instead of understanding and helping, with home care, officials are taking barbaric advantage of this mental handicap, and degrading it, by forcing helpless ailing elders into institutions.