In those rare moments when Mum is lucid, I wonder what I’ve done

Imagine you had the power to sentence someone, to pass judgment on them and incarcerate them. You bang the gavel and hand down a life term and the person is taken away and you feel righteous because you’ve had the guts to put a person where they belong. Then, some time later, you find out that person is innocent. Or could well be innocent.

At first glance this scenario seems like a hypothetical exercise for law students, a fictional predicament to impress upon them the importance of getting it right and the danger of getting it wrong. Merely a brief thought exercise for the rest of us.

Literature and cinema is overloaded with stories of crooked cops and wrongful arrest. An innocent is framed and convicted and rots in a cell while the fiend who committed the crime plots a course for the tropics. In the climax of the film there will be a dramatic close-up of the judge in the moment she realises she has imprisoned an innocent man. A look of dread is breaking on her face. Fade to black.

What must the night hold for real, live judges? How do they sleep, given the difficulty of finding truth, its imprecise and reticent nature, and the swing-and-a-miss spuriousness of judgment?

I manoeuvred Mum into an aged care facility a while back, despite her protests. Really, it was the only thing to do, once I’d judged her unable to cope alone. And now when I visit her the moments I dread most are not those when she’s announcing that tomorrow she’ll call a taxi and go back to the mountains and live alone. Such plans are clearly a fever-dream of independence and vitality, a type of reminiscence, and a calibrated rage against the dying of the light.

‘Lately … I’ll be hoping she slips into incoherence and away with the pixies, as Exhibit A that she belongs in the place I’ve put her.’

It’s sad to hear these tales of jailbreak, knowing they will never come to fruition. But the really dreadful moments for me are her periods of coherence, of perfect lucidity, in which she remembers all and weighs the world with that fine scale of reason she always packed. It’s in these appallingly coherent periods that I take on the role of that cinematic judge, dread breaking on my face, and ask myself, “What the hell have I done to an innocent person? To a person that I love?”

Lately, while having a perfectly reasoned conversation with her, I’ll be hoping she slips into incoherence and away with the pixies, as Exhibit A that she belongs in the place I’ve put her. When she says something bereft of all reality I know she is free again in the wilds of the past where the dead are alive and the future is golden. But, damn it – this coherence, this lucidity – her reckoning accurately with her current circumstance is a horror to me.

Since talking about this fear I’ve discovered it isn’t particular to me. Not by a long shot. Everyone I’ve spoken to who has an aged parent in care is sporadically struck with horror that they’ve imprisoned a person who ought to be free, still on the outside intermittently enjoying whatever’s left.