In 2021, I thought a lot about how my ankles look just like my Dad’s

Published on 20 December 2021

When I look down at my ankles they look like they belong to my Dad.

When I’m sitting with my legs stretched out, torso forward, and I look down at my ankles, I feel like I’m looking at his ankles, not mine. The viewpoint is so familiar: I’m back at his house during the last few years of his life and I’m leaning down slightly behind his left shoulder to put a cup of tea on his tray. It’s the kind of tray that has a bag filled with polystyrene balls attached underneath so it moulds to his lap and things don’t spill.

This year I’ve had problems with my back and I’ve been finding myself sitting down a lot instead of being my usual busy self. It’s meant I’ve had a lot of time to look at my legs. That’s when the resemblance occurred to me.

Somehow having my Dad’s ankles bothers me. I’m scared that my brain will end up like his too.

My sister and I started to get reports from a younger friend of Dad’s who lived in the same village. They said that someone had told her that our Dad wasn’t safe to go on holiday on his own. When I asked Dad if anything had happened he was puzzled and said of course not. I heard from the village friend that he’d been taken back to his hotel one day in a police car. 

I asked my Dad and it jogged a memory. He’d gone out for a walk and couldn’t remember how to get back to his hotel. He couldn’t remember the name of it either. He’d got confused and stopped 2 women who were walking past. They’d flagged down a passing police car and the policemen had driven my Dad around the town until he recognised the hotel where he was staying. 

We laughed at this story but really I was thinking oh shit. I hadn’t realised his dementia was as bad as this. I could see the last threads of his independence slipping away. I was scared about the level of care he might need from me and my sister in the near future.

In his last 3 years, my Dad smelled pretty bad. It was a lot of effort to get him to change his clothes so we could wash what he had been wearing. As time went by, the amount of underwear in the dirty washing basket dwindled. He was really touchy if I mentioned anything and he genuinely believed he was washing every day. He also believed that he was driving the car to the supermarket once a week, just like he believed he was still regularly walking to the village newsagent to pay his paper bill. 

Towards the end, the view of Dad’s ankles from slightly behind his left shoulder was the most familiar view I had of him. I suppose before that it was the view from across the small sitting room as he sat in his chair. Gradually, over the years, he became surrounded by piles of things that he could reach without having to get up. Some of these things were postcards from places he visited on holiday. He took holidays by coach for many years. He’d forgotten how to use a camera and he’d never used a mobile phone so he bought postcards to remind himself of where he’d been. In his bedroom, Dad had clothes piled on every surface. After he died, it took a long time to clear out. 

If I see pictures of myself I think: you look like Dad. Recently I’ve been making appreciative comments about viaducts, canals and old industrial buildings to my daughter. It’s not just my Dad’s ankles that I’ve inherited, it’s an interest in industrial history too. 

I’ve started wondering about what I’ll pass down. I hope it’s a long-term love of jazz funk and not a genetic predisposition for dementia.