My father’s dementia transformed his experience of the world and his body. The complexities of vision overwhelmed him; touch and smell became paramount. I miss him. The man he was, and this other man he became, alive in his senses.

He liked to touch all the flowers, all the plants. His world shrank, but we would still walk loops around the garden at his nursing home, hand in hand. He had never been a hand holder, a hugger, a tactile person before. But with his filters and barriers dissolving, he would stroke and caress plants, pausing to feel glossy spears of leaves, the soft fuzz of catkins, the crackle of dried beech, or just patting the top of shrubs as he passed, giggling at the prickle of holly, the shiver of daffodils. I’d offer him sprigs of rosemary, heads of lavender, broken flowers, and he’d breathe them hard, consuming them, guzzling the smell.

When he could no longer walk, he would still reach for plants or flowers on the table next to him, or raise my hand to his nose to find whatever perfume I was wearing.

The morning he died two years ago the room was full of smells–clean cotton pyjamas, Imperial Leather soap, and disinfectant cutting a clear path through the sinking sweet stink of illness and drugs. There was pure, cold mist coming through the garden window, the clove-tang of overflowing vases of night-scented stocks by the bed, the fear sweat and exhaustion of people who had dozed in armchairs for a week, cold coffee, lemon shortbread and slightly turned milk.
My father never wore Lush’s What Would Love Do? He had bonded for life with Old Spice.

I can’t wear this scent.

I only spray it on one of his handkerchiefs that I’d ugly-stitched his name tags onto, like a little boy off to boarding school, because it smells of him in his last years, of the feel of walking with him, of the pressure of his hand holding so hard to mine as he started to lose his way. It smells of the sun coming out in the garden. Of sharing an orange with him on a bench in the Botanics, fumbling it in his heavy-gloved hands, and watching him watch, wide-eyed, entranced, as blossom danced through the sky.

originally posted 14 May 2019