Bed sheets, covers, pillowcases, kitchen and bath towels, and t-shirts to boot

Life took a somewhat bad turn when my father-in-law began losing his way in his own apartment. More and more often it happened so that he would stand in the hallway of the flat he had occupied for half of his life and he would cry out loud: “God damn it, where am I?”

It wasn’t dementia. He knew very well he was at home. He just didn’t know where exactly. At the age of seventy-eight, he had gone totally blind.

The apartment wasn’t that big, by the way. Two small rooms, a narrow hallway, and a tiny kitchen. All in all, far less than sixty square meters. Our flat was bigger but I still could close my eyes and navigate around it without any difficulties. “What’s his deal?” I was asking myself. Maybe it was dementia.

In movies, they often show blind people who have no problem making themselves a cup of coffee, getting around town or even kicking ass of some street thugs, thanks to the development of the sixth sense — or at least acute hearing. Surprisingly, in real life blind people are much more helpless and desperate. They can’t even wipe their own ass and know for sure it’s clean.

All this became an unbearable burden for his wife, my mother-in-law. She herself was old and ill to be caring for a blind man. Besides, she had grown sick of his presence long before he went blind. They had lived together - same apartment, different rooms - almost their entire adult lives.

When we got tired of hearing her daily rants about the hell in which she was living, we took him in.

At the age of forty-four, I was back to sleeping on a couch. There was no spare room in the apartment, so we had to put him in our bedroom and move to the next room where we normally worked, dined, and watched TV.

It felt as if I had been a student again, living with my parents and having a girl over, doing my best to keep it quiet. The couch we now used as our bed wasn’t bought with this possibility in mind. Maybe it was a good thing he hadn’t developed acute hearing.

Luckily for us, he would usually fall asleep around seven. This habit was formed partly because his job required him to wake up early in the morning, partly because this allowed him to avoid meeting his wife, who was often cruel to him. She’d usually sleep till noon. Maybe she was avoiding him as well.

Now the whole concept of day and night was lost on him and his schedule became even weirder. He could wake up at two or three in the morning and begin living his life. He would get dressed, do his exercises, go to the bathroom to wash up… Or at least try to.

After his arrival, we became light sleepers, like parents of a newborn, and during those first months my wife and I would often wake up in the middle of the night, disturbed by a subtle rustling. Walking out into the hallway, which was long and winding, as it’s so common in Berlin houses, we would find him standing in some random corner, pressing his lips together, helplessly turning his head and touching the walls, trying to figure out where on earth he was.

He just couldn’t remember the way to the bathroom, although we would map out everything together time and again: there is the drawer, then the door to the kitchen, then the coat rack, then the turn, then the closet, then the bathroom door… Ten minutes later he would bump into the drawer and shout: “What’s this?” “It’s the drawer in the hallway.” “The drawer? There is a drawer in the hallway?”

It seemed that his brain just refused to process new information, being deprived of visual cues. At the same time, he had no problem recalling every street in his neighborhood, and every bus route that passed it, up to the last stop.

When navigating around the apartment, he would do the most bizarre things. Instead of always keeping at least one hand on the wall or furniture when walking, he would walk in arbitrary directions waving both hands - and not left and right but up and down, as if swimming doggy style. Then he would inevitably lose his way… After that, we would often find him weeping in his room. “I don’t want to live like that,” he quietly wailed through tears. “I don’t want to…”

So to avoid this, he preferred to stay in his room, most of the time just sitting in a chair or lying in bed and listening to the radio. I had to set up an app with a Russian radio on his old iPhone for him, since he didn’t know any other languages, and in Berlin, one couldn’t find a Russian station on short waves.

I comforted myself with the thought that nobody in the building could understand it, besides maybe Manfred, our neighbor from upstairs, who studied Russian in a German “uni”, but he probably had already forgotten it all. I did my best to find something politically neutral, but in the third year of the war it proved to be challenging. When he had to open the door to his room, my ear would still occasionally catch a report counting casualties among Ukrainians, always numerous.

All in all, it’s safe to say that after losing sight, my father-in-law’s lifestyle hadn’t changed that much. When he could still see, he would spend his days almost the same way: in his stuffy room doing nothing. Only instead of listening to the radio, he would watch whatever was on TV.

Half the power outlets in his house were held in their place with duct tape, even though he had previously worked in a factory and was paid to maintain various electrical equipment. He didn’t have any friends he could meet or call. He completely abandoned the few relatives that were still alive. And his life lacked any events worthy of a talk. He didn’t pay any attention to his family, including his grandson, our son. He never gave any gifts to anyone.

Now he started showing interest in who went where and did what. And in moments of clarity, he even began asking for some work - he was ready to do anything, just to make himself busy. Considering how bad he was at navigating around the place, my wife could come up with only a handful of activities for him to perform. Here is an almost complete list of them:

— taking his dirty plate to the sink after a meal

— emptying his overnight bucket

– shaving with an electric razor

– filling the water filter

– filling his water jar

– grating carrots for salads

– grating cheese and aubergines for risotto

– taking an apple out of the fridge and washing it under the kitchen tap

That’s where our imagination ran out. All this couldn’t get him occupied for long. Finally, we started giving him bed linen to iron. It took some effort to set up an ironing board and give him material for work. But he could do a pretty decent job with the sheets, covers, and pillowcases. To make it last, my wife started giving him kitchen and bath towels, including small face towels, and my t-shirts to boot.

I’d never seen a man who would iron stuff with such vigor. This activity gave him the sense of a great accomplishment. He would always be in good spirits after ironing. And in a couple of days, he would ask if there was anything more to iron.

We’d never ironed our bed sheets before. Why would we? It’s just a waste of time and effort. Besides, in Germany electricity isn’t cheap. And global warming is still very much a concern.