So you have a pension, good pension incomes and you have some savings and obviously the value of your house?

Yeah.

So all those things together you know that you’re…

That’s right, yeah.

… in that position. Do you know how your children, your family, feel about this?

Yes, yes, yes.

Would you like to tell me?

[Sighs].

We can come back to that if you’d rather.

Yeah. They said, “Spend it all dad.”

It’s for you and your wife…

That’s it, yeah.

…to have what you need?

Yeah, in an instant (sounding a little upset) yeah.

So that’s reassuring to you that the three of them all feel, you know, they’re all together on that, which is…

Completely.

…reassuring to you isn’t it?

Completely yes, yes. But the most, the only disappointed one really is me because I had plans to leave them much better off than I started and it’s not going to happen.

It did become difficult when, as I’ve referred earlier, his sons were very determined that perhaps he should go somewhere considerably more expensive and I, at that point, had to say, “Unless you’re prepared to contribute to those costs actually I’m afraid he can’t go there.” Which was difficult but, you know and they weren’t prepared to contribute financially so that sort of ended the debate really, mm.

So I do think finding the right person, the right people and just be, you know, it’s going to cost a lot of money, it’s going to cost a lot of money, and I suppose you don’t know how long you’re going to need it for. So I don’t, it’s complicated. It’s, ah the other thing that’s worked to my advantage probably is that I’m, it’s a double-edged sword. I’m an only child which means that it’s all been on me to sort out, which has been hard, but I don’t have any sibling friction; and I’ve seen that in a lot of families where one person wants to keep looking after the person in their own home and I know a daughter who does that and another sibling, her sister, would have wanted to put them up in a care home, sell the house and put, you know; so different people having different ideas about what’s right.

I had a promotion at work so you know, a lot of responsibility at work, as well, and with the strain of, of, you know, obviously of things becoming a lot more apparent that things weren’t right with mum and dad. It was just too much to cope with and I was you know, sort of, struggling. I was really stressed, stress levels were so high. So I actually went and spoke to the head at that time just to say, you know, “I just, you know, I’m finding it all really difficult to sort of be there for mum and dad and, and sort of maintain my role at work.” And she did at first allow me just to have you know, I had a half day off which helped initially but then it was apparent very quickly it just wasn’t enough to sort of, you know, oversee what was going on with mum and dad, and so I just made the decision which, yeah, it was, it was difficult, and obviously if things had been different I, you know, I wouldn’t have done that, I wouldn’t have gone part-time at that point, because after having had the children and being part-time for while they were all young you know, this was, you know, I was sort of, suddenly sort of becoming a lot more career-orientated and wanting to, you know, develop that, and, but it just wasn’t, you know, just, it just wasn’t feasible and to be there for mum and dad.

I’d approached the care agency for night care but it’s double the cost; so at the time we were paying £18.50 an hour in the day, so that rose to something like £34 in the evening, an hour, and that was just, we can’t afford that, and the council said to me, no, they weren’t going to fund any overnight care whatsoever, so that would all be our funding. Now whether they would have started funding the daytime care to help us pay for the [night care], I don’t know, because we never reached that point, because by the time he’d been, I think it was only about 3 or 4 days when I’d had some sleep and life was what you would call normal but we realised hadn’t been normal. So we hadn’t realised until then; I think it was when I watched half an hour programme without being disturbed, I ended up hysterically crying, realising that we hadn’t ever done that for a good year, if not 18 months, we hadn’t ever chatted to each other, we hadn’t done anything as a family, because dad was always there and we always… You know – it sounds worse than it was – he didn’t make our lives hell but you suddenly realise that you couldn’t be yourselves because there was this other person that needed a bit of attention, and it was at that point then that I just sort of said, “I can’t go back to doing this anymore.” And then, you know, so we then approached the nursing home.

So is that, do you think having that has also perhaps helped your mum and dad sort of restore their relationship a little bit by having these people in instead?

Yeah, yeah, I think so, because my mum was getting quite angry with my dad for interfering and accusing her of not washing or not washing her hair when she was saying that she had washed it but it was clear to see that she hadn’t and she’d probably just thought she had. So definitely it puts that pressure off my dad so he can just carry on getting ready himself in the morning while my mum’s being sorted out and then carry on the rest of their day together without really any interruptions from anyone, yeah.