There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

This was the most stressful period of my childhood and adolescence, with all of us crammed into our house 24/7—although the hospital loaned Dad a wheelchair so we could take Granny outside on nice days. Nonetheless, she couldn’t get up the stairs to go to the one bathroom we had, and we did not have a spare bedroom for her. In Roddymoor the toilet had been downstairs, in the space where a pantry had been; to go up to bed, Granny would sit on the stairs and push herself up while I or Grandad braced and held on to her. (Coming down was a bit of a nightmare and left her with huge purple bruises on her back, legs, and arms if she slipped.) The stairs in our house were far too narrow to carry out the same maneuver, so Granny spent two years living in our front room, sleeping on the sofa, with a commode so she could go to the toilet at the back of the dining area, in a little wooden addition that Dad built with the help of neighbors. Mam gave her sponge baths. Eventually Granny got assigned a nursing home place just a few blocks away. She lasted only another year. She wasn’t sick, but she was in chronic despair. A week before she died, Granny told Dad she had simply had enough.