He could never keep up with her either. She was too quick, too well-read; she had facts and figures at her fingertips, and their discussions over the dinner table would always end with him laughing and agreeing that she was definitely right and he didn’t know why he even argued. She would say she didn’t know why he argued either because she always kicked his ass. When I got older I would join in; it was the one time when Mum and I were a team instead of Dad and I. When she started to lose her thread and get confused, I stopped wanting to argue. Especially since she moved out. If he tries to goad me now with a stupid comment that he knows will rile me up, I do my best not to take the bait. It makes me sad. I don’t think he understands that.

The people in the home didn’t know these things about her. I thought about telling them. I crafted long speeches where I told them what she was really like and gave them a piece of my mind. But I never did. They were just doing their jobs. And there was a part of me that thought if I shared those things with other people they would become diluted. I’d lose the little part of Mum that I owned from knowing who she was before.

When Dad told me Mum had to go into the home, that it wasn’t safe, we couldn’t provide enough supervision, I couldn’t accept it. Sure, she was deteriorating, I could see that. We were in a state of constant alert. There was very little else going on in our lives. But I was OK with that. It was my mum. We could manage. We would try harder, I said.

I cried and yelled and told him it would happen over my dead body. Or his, preferably. But not long after he brought it up, things changed. I was at school, Dad was at work, and the care workers who came in six times a day were between visits. Mum left the house and got lost. She was always trying to leave, and it was hard to manage because you couldn’t have an eye on her all the time and you couldn’t just lock her up in a room. That wasn’t fair or safe. But it wasn’t safe to let her roam around either. She was too confused.

That day, the care worker got to the house and found the front door open. She couldn’t find Mum anywhere. She rang my dad and couldn’t get through to him. She called the police. Then she called me at school. I phoned Dad over and over and tried his office, but they said he was in a client meeting and had left his phone on his desk.