Parkinson’s, Whisky, and the Emotional Admin of Distance

Back in June when I started the move from the cesspit previously known as Twitter and focusing most of my efforts into Bearly Politics, I started doing a Sunday post that was a bit more personal. Not a full-on journal, per se (literally no one wants that), but an opportunity once a week to try and put forward a little bit less of a political commentator persona, and more a bit me.

The first thing to acknowledge is that yes, this is not a Sunday. I have not lost my calendar or forgotten how days of the week work (though there was a point in Croatia a few weeks back that exactly this happened).

The second thing many of you who have followed me here from the cesspit know is that my dad has been very ill for a long time now. Parkinson’s, diagnosed a few years back, has left him on a slow but steady downward trajectory. But the Parkinson’s is not the whole story. My dad is also an alcoholic. Has been for as long as I’ve been alive. And so what you get is a difficult cocktail: neurodegenerative decline, booze, nicotine, and all the baggage of a man who was never particularly kind to begin with.

Last year, when things deteriorated significantly, we made the decision to put him into a care home. It was the right thing to do. He needed more support than any of us could give at home, and frankly, my mum had carried that load for decades already. But this week, the care home told us they’d had enough.

And in truth, I can’t blame them.

He is abusive to staff, he hasn’t stopped drinking, and he smokes inside. As in: inside the building. Imagine being a care worker walking into a room that smells like a 1970s pub carpet. They’re well within their rights to say no more. Still, hearing it is hard. Hard because it’s final, hard because it forces us back into the emotional admin of finding another place, and hard because however much you prepare for moments like this, you’re never really prepared.

I suppose one of the contradictions of this whole thing is that it’s both entirely unsurprising and yet still knocks the air out of me. He hasn’t stopped drinking - still on about five bottles of whisky every fortnight (which, if you’re keeping track, is a rate that would flatten most mortals). He hasn’t stopped smoking - indoors, defiantly.

And he hasn’t stopped being himself.

That last bit is just might be the hardest - the Parkinson’s has taken so much from him physically, but it hasn’t fundamentally changed his personality. He was always a difficult man, often an exceedingly cruel one, and that doesn’t suddenly melt away with illness. It’s the childhood I grew up with, it’s the adulthood I’ve lived with, and it’s the reality we’re managing now.

Do you ever really “deal” with that? I don’t think so. You just learn to carry it differently.

What’s been almost harder than dealing with him directly, though, is watching what it’s done to my mum. Every call I have with her now is loaded with anger and resentment, decades of frustration finding fresh fuel in every new crisis. I don’t resent her for it - god only knows she’s earned the right to vent - but it’s exhausting in its own way. I never quite know what to say back. I want to support her, but I also end most conversations feeling like a sponge that’s been wrung out. And the truth is, I don’t know how to cope with that, not really. It’s hard enough to manage my own emotions about my dad without also feeling like I have to absorb hers.

And maybe the hardest bit of all is seeing, in real time, the complete obliteration of my parents’ marriage. Whatever it once was, it’s now just bitterness and endurance, a long, drawn-out unravelling where the affection died years ago but the obligations kept going. It’s bleak to watch, and it makes me hold my husband that much tighter. I find myself quietly promising him - and myself - that I’ll never let us end up in the same place, that we’ll keep choosing each other, even when life gets hard. There’s something painful but clarifying in that: you see what you don’t want, and it makes you treasure what you have.

And of course, there’s the financial side of things. He hasn’t worked in three years, so his upkeep is being covered by my mum with me helping where I can. Care homes in South Africa don’t exactly come cheap, and neither does a whisky habit that would make Churchill say “woah now, that’s a bit much”. I’ve had to reframe “supporting my parents” less as filial duty and more as a sort of parallel tax system.

At the same time, I find myself asking if I can blame my dad for where he is. Imagine losing your mobility, your ability to write, to speak clearly, to be independent. Imagine needing someone to help you dress or eat or even get to the loo. Would you not also cling to the last things you could still control? A cigarette. A drink. A sharp word when you feel powerless.

It doesn’t excuse it, but it does make a tragic kind of sense. And that’s what makes it so complicated when it comes to what I feel, striking that balance between compassion and frustration.

And here’s the structural side.

Many of you know I work in the health service, which means I inevitably spend most of my week thinking about systems of care. In the UK, if you’re very ill, your local authority has a certain set of obligations. Assessments are done, placements found, care funded or part-funded. The state is the framework. In South Africa, where my dad is, the state is almost absent. Care is a family affair, supplemented by whatever private provision you can afford.

There’s no statutory safety net to catch you if you can’t. That means that when my dad is evicted, the job of finding a new place, paying for it, organising it - all of that falls to my mum, and to me at a distance. It’s relentless. It’s emotionally exhausting. And in saying that, I also know we are lucky: lucky that we can even consider alternatives, lucky that we’re not entirely without options. Many families simply couldn’t.

So we’ve found ourselves in this position now, looking for a new care home in a country where good ones are scarce, and where even the good ones struggle to deal with someone who refuses to stop drinking, smoking, and raging. It’s not just a logistical problem; it’s an emotional one. Every phone call is fraught. Every discussion with my mum feels like both problem-solving and grief management. Because you’re not just finding a room. You’re being reminded again and again of decline, of loss, of the version of him that’s gone.

The distance adds its own weight. Calls come at odd hours, WhatsApps ping with updates, and there’s the gnawing guilt of being a continent away. I can’t be there to shoulder the load physically, so instead I get to be the voice on the phone while my mum bears the brunt of it. And I’ll be honest, that guilt sharpens every time I go on holiday. Croatia was wonderful, but there’s always that quiet voice saying: shouldn’t you be spending this time in South Africa instead?

And yet, going back isn’t easy either.

My relationship with my dad is… fraught, to put it politely. It’s hard being around him for any length of time, and harder still not to slip back into old wounds. So I ration my visits. Call it self-preservation, call it cowardice, but it’s the only way I’ve found to cope. And still, just because the relationship is bad doesn’t mean I don’t care. If anything, it makes the whole thing heavier: you’re grieving someone you never really had, while still trying to do right by them now.

I realise now that I’ve been going on for quite a while now, so I suppose I should answer the question some of you might have: Why share this now?

Well, partly because I said I would.

When I started doing these Sunday posts, the idea was to let some of the politics guard down and speak a little more like I would to a friend. And partly because I don’t think it’s separate from politics at all. Care is politics. Illness is politics. The way societies deal with ageing, with decline, with dependency - that’s politics.

The fact that my mum and I are filling the role of what would be the council in the UK is politics. The fact that there’s no statutory protection against being turfed out of a care home in South Africa is politics. These go beyond being family dramas, and they become reflections of how systems do - or don’t - work.

It’s also, in its way, an apology.

My schedule here has been a bit all over the place. I’ve been back at work after holiday, which has been a full-on shock to the system. I’ve been trying to stay on top of writing, which I don’t want to let slip, and in the middle of that, I’ve been doing emotional admin across continents. So if I’m a bit late, or a bit off, it’s not because I don’t care about this space. Quite the opposite. It’s because sometimes life barges in and refuses to be pencilled neatly into the margins.

But I don’t want to end on a moan, because it isn’t one. It’s just the reality of what’s happening behind the writing right now. And there is good news too. Bearly Politics is back on the leaderboard again for world politics, coming in at number 40 in rising. That’s small, maybe, in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like something worth celebrating. It’s proof that even when life is messy, there’s still space for building something, for finding readers, for making this project grow.

One practical note as well: I am catching up on emails at the moment, so thank you to everyone who’s reached out about comp subscriptions for archive access - I’ll be getting back to you all soon. And just to repeat what I’ve said before: if you’re in a tight spot financially - pensioners, students, journalists, UC claimants - feel free to drop me a line at iratusursusmajor@gmail.com and I’ll happily comp you. No questions asked.

So that’s my update. I’m sorry it was a bit heavy, a bit tangled, but hopefully honest. I’ll get back to the usual rhythm soon enough. In the meantime, thanks for being here, for reading, for letting me use this space as both soapbox and sounding board. And if nothing else, let this serve as a reminder: even the most political of us live lives full of very human complications, and sometimes those bleed into the work, and honestly maybe they should.

Because if politics isn’t about how we care for each other when things get hard, then what on earth is it about?

With great affection and gratitude,

E