I try to uncurl her as I massage her skin. She relaxes, and then I can dress her. I always ask her, ‘What would you like to wear today, Margaret?’ I know how much importance humans attach to clothes. They read each other’s clothing like a book, instantly. Here are some of the things they see: gender, age, status, wealth, nature of employment, social class, affiliation to social groups and networks, ethnic origin, political beliefs, musical preferences, sexual orientation and availability. They aren’t always right about everything, but they never stop doing it.

A great deal of information about this is available to me online, but as with the social taboos about death, many nuances are not recorded, but simply understood somehow. And they change over time.

Margaret can’t see her clothes, and is not usually present enough to make a choice. But sometimes when I try to put something on her, she objects. Since I am choosing from her own clothes, and I have a database of colour matches, fabric textures and styles, I know I’m not committing gross errors. It seems her mood is a factor, and I can’t predict it. I have tried to correlate it to the observable facts about her mental and physical state, but I can’t.

A similar difficulty can occur with her food. I lift her from her bed – she is light, having lost much of her muscle and fat, as the looseness of her skin also testifies – and put her into her chair. Then I fetch her breakfast, which is liquidised into a wet paste. It contains foods she likes, and they are not blended together, so she can taste each of them individually.

She starts out with difficulty, and has to remember how to swallow. At this stage in the progress of her decline, it’s common, and taken to mean her death is not far off.

Once she does remember, I spoon her food in, and sometimes she enjoys it, and eats well. But not always. And again, I can’t predict her reaction. It doesn’t have anything to do with the food. She will reject things she liked the day before. Nor does it have anything to do with her degree of alertness, her choice of clothes, the weather, or anything else I can observe.

The whole of the day is like this. I will take her into the atrium, to be with others. I will talk to her. I will try some activities, including gentle physical exercise. And some of these will go well, and she will like them, and some not. She will be communicative, or not. She will be happy, or not.