My mum's dementia

"Who's that in the photo, there ?"
"That's me, your son."
"Oh, wasn't I good-looking when I was young ?"
I felt embarrassed she should seem so vain
but as old age had filched her memories,
dementia leached politeness from her brain
and loosed the normal verbal courtesies
from her vocabulary. What remained
was language that seemed sensible at first
"Where did you say this was coming from ?"
till constant pointless repetition strained
belief in any underlying thirst
for knowledge !
"Where did you say this was coming from ?"
                           Then the sadness of inane
remarks instead of conversation failed
to stop my irritation being plain.
"Smoking kills ? It's never done me any harm."
The lies about the chores un-done
"I cleaned the floor two days ago."
                                                      soon paled
beside the foreign places that she claimed
she'd visited, insisting she'd seen all
the tourist highlights. I am sure she blamed
me for my winter travelling. The gall
of feeling she was being slighted stained
her personality indelibly,
her sense of self-importance so engrained
she could, still sane, reply incredibly
to "Is there no-one better than yourself ?"
"No, I'm as good as anyone." Insane,
any suggestion meant to help implied
some criticism of herself; her main
conviction was she did no wrong. I tried
to reason with her sometimes but the bane
of our relationship she could not hide -
her disappointment and resentful pain
at her displacement by my bourgeois bride.
Even in forty years it didn't wane;
her only child, I carried all her pride,
and expectations baulked made her complain
"You said I'd live near you when Lily died
but sold the house without even telling me."
She wanted to be loved yet couldn't deign
to loving - but, now guilty while I live,
even affection I found hard to feign
and duty was the most that I could give.