Second hand Records and Ice Cream

I have known Han for eleven years. Or so she said and I thought it was actually eight.

That is still longer than some marriages. Longer than most friendships made in adulthood, when we are already calcified into ourselves and only rarely let someone through. Eleven years of fries and ice cream and second hand records and the particular intimacy that grows between two people who have nothing obvious in common except the fact that they chose each other, again and again, without being required to.

I was her carer for two and a half years. After that, I kept coming back.

***

When I first met her she was still in the neighbourhood, in her own apartment, with her own kitchen and her own cups. She would make tea. She knew how she liked it and she knew how you liked it too, because she had been paying attention. That is the thing about Han — she was always paying attention. Sharp and small and opinionated in the way of women who have survived enough to stop pretending. She told me things about her life with the ease of someone who had nothing left to hide. Her daughters. Her past. Her friend Nel, who lived upstairs and came over every single day, the way good friends do when they understand that time is running out and proximity is its own form of love.

One afternoon she told me she fell in love with women.

'Yes, and?' I asked. And shrugged. 'Love is love,' I said.

She looked at me for a moment. Then she laughed.

She showed me their friendship rings, hers and Nel's. She didn't say much about them. She didn't have to.

***

Before Han and I became neighbours, I was living and working in London. I worked in a hospital there, one of thousands of so-called immigrants keeping the system breathing. Then the UK voted for Brexit and I packed my one suitcase and came home. Not because I was asked to leave — but because I didn't want to keep giving my energy to a place that had voted, publicly, that people like me were provisional. That our belonging was conditional. That it could be revoked.

So I came back to the Netherlands. And the care home where I had once worked in the kitchen as a teenager, where I had first understood what care could be, opened a door. They offered me a studio apartment in an unused wing. 1970s-built, set for demolition, still standing. A lighthouse, I would later think. A forgotten place that turned into a sanctuary.

And that is where I was living when the pandemic arrived.

I lived where I worked. I worked where people were most vulnerable. The world outside went quiet, and the world inside became everything.

That is also where Han came to find me.

***

She had moved into the care home by then. Her apartment was gone, her neighbourhood was gone, Nel was still there, but not very mobile. The geography of their friendship had collapsed. Han was navigating a building she didn't choose, corridors that looked the same as each other, days that could blur into one long institutional hum.

I had not told any of the clients which room was mine.

She knocked on every door until I opened.

She was standing there with her stroller, and in the basket underneath, a bottle of cherry liquor. It was my birthday. She had found out somehow — Han always found out — and she had decided that I should not spend it alone. That self-isolating with the elderly in a pandemic-era care home was not a reason to skip a toast.

We sat together behind my closed door. We drank. Outside, somewhere in the street below, children were playing songs with banners that read: 'thank you to the carers'. I was the carer. I was also the one being cared for. Han had walked — had wheeled — the entire length of the corridor to make sure I knew someone was thinking of me.

When the evening shift arrived, I had to walk her back to her apartment, the two of us a little tipsy, trying not to laugh too loudly in the hallway.

***

Dementia takes things in an order you cannot predict. It took her reading before it took her words. It took her neighbourhood before it took her name. It moved through her the way water moves through stone — not all at once, but insistently, until the shape of things changes.

On my last visit, there was a nurse with us — a friend of mine, a former colleague. I had made sure, when I moved out, that she became Han's first contact nurse. Not by accident. By intention. Because I knew what Han needed, and I knew who my friend was, and sometimes care means making the right connections before you are no longer there to make them yourself.

Together, the three of us and another former workmate wheeled her bed through the corridors and helped her into the bath. One more bubble bath, with so many bubbles that we had to mop them up. Just the way Han liked it. 'Hey,' she said, 'this is the same bath they threw you into when you left the company.' I washed her hair. 'Yes, when you had tricked me into coming downstairs after my shift and everyone was there and off I went, in my uniform, straight into the bath.' She nodded. 'When you borrowed my floral pyjamas.'

***

Last night I was on the floor, working my shift, when my phone rang.

It was her — my friend, Han's nurse. The night before she had told me how Han was doing. And in her story, there was a detail: Han was afraid to die. She was going to sleep with clenched fists. I had asked her to call me when she went in to give Han her midazolam. When she was still awake. I wanted to say goodbye.

She held the phone to Han's ear and put me on speaker.

Han could no longer speak.

But I spoke to her.

'You can rest, Han. You fought hard and you won. You raised two beautiful daughters. You raised me and my dog too, in your own way. You can let go now. We will meet again. I love you.'

Han made a sound.

After her shift ended, my friend texted me. Han, her, and Han's daughter had all had tears in their eyes.

'I wrote it in my report,' she said.

She didn't have to do any of that. She did it anyway.

At the end of my own shift, my colleagues pulled me into a group hug. They had seen me get emotional and given me the space to speak. I showed them a photo — Han and me, my dog on her bed, her laughing. The kind of laugh that takes over her whole small face.

***

Han is 76. They have started the morphine and midazolam now.

I keep thinking about what people mean when they talk about professionalism in care. They mean distance. Boundaries. The management of affect. The careful maintenance of a self that does not get too close, does not feel too much, does not blur the line between carer and cared-for.

I have always believed something different.

The biggest professional achievement I know is making someone feel seen. Not as a diagnosis. Not as a care plan or a set of needs to be administered. But as a person who has lived — who has a friend called Nel and a collection of second hand records and a friendship ring that means something that I will never fully know and don't need to. As a woman who fell in love with women and told a young nurse about it over tea in her own kitchen, in her own apartment, before the apartment was gone. As someone who found out which room I was in by knocking on every single door in the corridor, because she had decided I mattered, and Han, when she decided something, did not stop until she arrived.

That is the work.

A bottle of cherry liquor in the basket of a stroller. A bubble bath on the last good visit. A phone held to an ear after a night shift ended.

That is what care looks like when it is allowed to be human.

That is what we are fighting for, every time we fight.

That has always been the work.