Love, Truth and Prunes

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
(from Metaphors We Live By, G. Lakoff and M. Johnson)

I was recently listening to John Killick on Radio 4 talking about his conversations with people with dementia. It reminded me of the amazing (and lengthy) ‘phone conversations which I used to have with my late father. My father had fronto-temporal dementia and spent his last couple of years in a specialist home in Oxfordshire. Too far away to visit each week, my brother and I used to call him every other day or so – just to chat. Actually, my father used to do most of the talking – sometimes holding the ‘phone to his mouth and, sometimes carefully placing it (mid-sentence) in the pocket of his much-loved, old tweed jacket. At this point the conversations would become inevitably more muffled (at his end) and shouty (at mine).

As a cognitive psychologist, I became fascinated by his increasingly creative use of language and metaphor. As his daughter, I just enjoyed connecting (where I could) with the eclectic mixture of meanings, pleasures, memories and humour which summed my father up perfectly. It certainly taught me that communication with someone you love is not about facts and coherent sentences but about the rhythm of conversation. Even though I often couldn’t follow his precise meaning, I could catch the drift and join in and I found that conversations which didn’t rely on (shared) logic and facts or even any standard notion of coherence were actually warm, fun and insightful and, above all, made me feel close to him.

My father’s conversation was increasingly dominated by a fixed number of interrelating ‘themes’ most of which had been important throughout his life – his Christian beliefs and life as an Anglican lay reader preparing weekly sermons and services, his loving care for his wife (my mother) during her long years with dementia – (had she eaten all the prunes he’d given her?, could he get her clothes dry before morning?). Then there was his lifelong love for sailing and the sea and finally his (recently acquired) fear of MRSA (which he contracted during an earlier stay in hospital).

For a while, prunes (and their consumption) were the single dominating theme ‘Love, Truth and Prunes’ became his recurring phrase – the subject (it seemed) of a sermon he was constantly looking for the right opportunity to preach. Meanwhile, he would devour these fruit by the dozen. Whilst in hospital in Oxford, we took to shipping tins of prunes in by the box load in the hopes of keeping the anxious ward staff abreast of his demand.

Below are some examples of my father’s metaphors which I jotted down as he chatted on the ‘phone and some thoughts on what I took them to mean…

“the idea is 18 prunes, followed by 5 cornflakes and then 3 hymns which is ideal in setting the stage” I guess the cognitive acts of planning a balanced meal and planning a balanced Church service are not that dissimilar – in both cases, my father knew he needed to hold the interest of a potentially distractible audience!

“in the last hour, they’ve been quietly wheeling out the less confident members of the congregation … they’re collecting them in special yellow bags and disposing of them by the lift” Here, I think, there’s a cross-over between the institutional process he witnessed for disposing of unwanted or unacceptable items and the process of ‘disposing’ of unwanted or unacceptable people. As he struggled with nursing home culture, did my father fear that he might be one of the latter?

“you need the confidence here to know how to respond to each eddy and gust… some good friends came alongside and gave me a tow to lunch” Living in a nursing home was a traumatic and difficult experience for my father – I liked this familiar sailing analogy of reacting to gusty, unpredictable wind conditions (over which you have no control) and then the concept of the friendly ‘fellow sailors’ “coming alongside” and offering a slightly slow (and increasingly unstable) vessel a welcome “tow to lunch”.

“so much detail gets increasingly important but it’s very very demanding on my back” Here maybe the increasing ‘pain’ of struggling to manage detailed information in his head became mixed with the physical pain of a stiff back?

“there’s a lot of literature in the bathroom which has not been properly aired .. I tried to build up in my library material about changes in underclothes” In the latter days of caring for my mother, the floors, tables and chairs of their house were always covered with a random selection of my father’s sermon notes, lists, ideas and correspondence together with my mother’s clothes which always needed drying. Maybe my father worried about his sermon plans not being ready (or ‘aired’ we might say) for use on Sunday morning?

“I’ve been towing the content of my origins but the ground is very uneven but I’m leaving literature in the thin patches”. In his small room in the nursing home, my father had a small number of his much loved boxes of ideas, lists, letters and sermon notes – he would constantly empty these out on the floor (and bed and chairs) as he sorted and re-sorted them, read and re-read fragments and tried to make further notes with his vast collection of coloured pens. It felt as if he might be trying to reconstruct his sense of his identity (or ‘origins’) from the paper fragments lying on his floor but maybe this process felt as stumbling and uncertain as his increasingly unsteady attempts at walking along the corridor to lunch.

“it’s very cold here – the heating arrangements were superb but now they’ve been deperbed” – And finally, this is just one of the many examples of my father’s playful use of language. I find it fascinating that a brain, sadly damaged by this stage, could still generate entirely original and consciously humorous turns of phrase.

I miss our conversations.