Tonight was the first Lions dinner of 2012. It is usual to pay your fees at the second dinner in January so members were lining up to pay. Suddenly I realized I have to either pay for another six months for Ray or write a letter of resignation on his behalf. How very sad, another thing that the combination of strokes and dementia has taken away from him. After 28 years of being a member, and a very active one at that prior to the 1999 stroke, there will be little chance of him even getting back for a special dinner.

I go away for a week on Friday, down to visit my daughter and her family. Trev, Edie and Lucas will be packing up while I am away to move to a rental house two suburbs away. They wanted to move now so they can set up a room for the baby. My house is a three bedroom but of course I am in one of them. I think I was foolish to believe we could all manage here. Three generations living happily in one house can only be done with a lot of cooperation. While some can do it, we found we could not live comfortably together in such a small space.

Maybe now is the right time for them to make the move while Edie has some energy. She has some health issues which might mean bed rest later in her pregnancy. I feel sorry for Trevor having to repack for another move, they have a lot already packed and stored up the back, in our old cabin, so it won't be as bad as when they moved the last two times. They have been mostly using my stuff while they have been here. They are hoping the next move will be to a house of their own.

Because Ray does not recall having visitors it is easy for me to assume he doesn't have any. I found out tonight two lots of Lions have visited him since Christmas. A member of our WAGS group also visited him last week. So he does have visitors, just no recollection of them. One of the men tonight said they had "quite a yarn" and Ray seemed "quite bright". They must have had better luck than Trevor had when he tried to visit Ray yesterday afternoon and found him asleep and impossible to wake up. Sounded like some of the visits I have to see my Mum.

Ray's personality is slowly changing now, I guess it is partly that he is in care and not moving around in the community as he used to. This means there are not a lot of changes and his life is very much more routine. This also means not as much interchanging of ideas, dealing with people, struggling with problem solving etc. Most of the nursing home staff are kind but busy so conversations are short and not really meaningful.

I read to Ray as I think that will help to stimulate his imagination but I think it is inevitable that at some stage he will stop talking as he doesn't have a lot of conversations now apart from those I initiate.We do join in with a group of people in the courtyard outside his room under the pergola. This is good for me as it is like a mini caregivers' support group but it is not like family contact, Ray needs that too. I need to encourage our children to take the grandchildren to see him as much as they are able to. I fear he will start to forget them now. His short time memory is bad and his medium to long term memory is too. He is forgetting the past and is unable to contemplate the future.

I realise my life is changing more and more and soon it will bear little resemblance to the life I had as a full-time caregiver. I am just realising I will never again have contact with some of the carers who used to come here on a regular basis. In a way it is like losing friends all over again as for a time they were our friends, closer than friends who rarely visited as some of them came twice a week for a while. For the past six months or so I was too busy supervising Ray's care in the nursing home to take time out to look at my life and see what it was evolving into,now I really need to do that.

I will take some time while I am away to think bout how I want to manage the chores I have to do, the visits to Ray and the spare time in between. I do not want to fill my time with joining committees, doing volunteer work or minding grandkids. But although I know what I do not want to do I do not know what I do want to do.