Frail care killed my mother too, and I didn’t do enough

It takes guts to do what the Callaghan family did: lay a charge against the frail care centre that abused and starved their mother.

Guts I didn’t have with my mother – and I buried her within a year.

I refuse to use the word “alleged” when I read abused or starved, because that was my reality, too, 13 years ago.

It was a “good home”, my parents thought when they moved into their one-bedroom unit.

Must be if it was, in its far-away history, named after an ex-prime minister’s wife. But the first red flag was when Mom was moved to frail care “because she’s not all there”.

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I knew she still was and took on the resident social worker.

But I lost that fight and two weeks later she was booked into a ward with seven other “Not Theres” with no stimulation, no conversation, not even a willing arm to hook in for a short walk.

She sat in a chair next to her bed.

She lost the battle for her sanity hardly a month later.

Every weekly visit, I saw her first fall silent, then only smiling and then the heartbreaking “who are you?” look.

The second red flag was a phone call to tell me my mother has been found.

“She was missing?”

Apparently, but the centre had not missed her.

Late one afternoon, she walked out of the front door, past the guard at the gate and down a peak-hour four-lane road.

A helper at the centre spotted her on his way home and brought her back to safety.

Safety?

The red flags came fast and furious.

She lost weight – a lot.

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I realised during one visit they just plonk her food in front of her and take it away, untouched, hours later. I started timing my visits around the food tray.

But a woman – nobody – can survive on one good meal weekly. When she resembled a marabou stork, I desperately dropped off protein shakes, pleading for just one a day to be prepared for her.

I found dozens of unopened tins after her death. And her death came swiftly.

She somewhere somehow fell and it took the centre three days to realise she had broken her hip. She survived the hip replacement – but not the aftercare.

Three months later we buried her. Cause of death? Septicemia.

Her uncleaned wound killed her.

I should have had the guts, too…