You only realise there is a different planet to the one we normally trudge when a close relative or a next-of-kin has to go into a home which you then start visiting regularly. This has been the case with me during the past six months, at the start of which my mum finally had to accept physical and psychological defeat at the wrinkled hands of Old Father Time, and unresistingly agreed she could no longer cope on her own.

It is not a very happy time, as so many people who have been through the trauma before can vouch. You would like your loved one to continue to be always there for you, waiting for you with your favourite, still warm pudina tal-ħobż, and ready to recall stories and anecdotes from your childhood to your own bemused offspring who, in their own way, have simply grown too fast. For many years, this all-too-familiar scene seems and feels like a time warp you eagerly enter into between your everyday work, earning your bread and butter, and raising a family, both of which also seem to have taken place in record time.

Then it happens. You suddenly realise mum is becoming forgetful. You always visit on a Friday. So why does she ask, every time, what day of the week is it? You stop looking forward to the pudina. When you ask about it, mum, who has done it and decorated it hundreds of times, admits she does not know how to make it anymore. Her favourite TV programmes, mostly drama and magazines, no longer interest her. It is not infrequent to find her watching the most unlikely of programmes, like a discussion on the state of the world economy, not understanding a single word being said and with the volume full on for the benefit of the surrounding neighbourhood.

When the move finally has to be made, you are caught in a heart-wrenching situation. The old home in the old village becomes hauntingly empty. Even the furniture, under and over most of which you have doodled the names of your famous football players and of your first loves, takes a surreal tinge. It seems sombre and waiting for the dust of time to descend on it like ugly, badly produced confetti.

But more drama awaits you in her new “home”. The different planet that you will now experience from a distance, but close enough, while your loved one tries to grapple with her new situation of new faces, possibly new enemies and friends, a new regime and a new phase in a life that is fast turning into a saga of simple impossibilities, such as making one’s own cup of tea, having a shower and remembering where the blessed dining hall is in this big, forbidding building. Of course she also has to remember she is hungry.

You and your siblings try to make it as easy and comfortable as it can possibly be for her. You leave post-it notes that remain unread. You take sweets and prepare snacks. The sweets are gobbled down in an instant, the snacks remain untouched. You take framed photographs to instil some moments of nostalgia, then you realise it is actually happening to you and not to the intended one. You have to follow a timetable, but more often than not she has either been waiting for unscheduled hours for you to appear, or you find her asleep when it is still only 6.30 in the evening and officially visiting time.

You also discover the inhabitants of this new planet with her. Some are strikingly still aware of their surroundings, still highly alert to life’s daily fare and still willing to engage you in intelligent conversation. I discover a former headmistress from my primary school days who not only remembers me, but is also still throwing bits and pieces of English at you lest you have forgotten her stern but amazingly effective method of teaching.

A colourful array of characters fills the corridors, the lounge areas (where the central TV set offers ever-changing scenes from all the local channels, a very wise political move on the part of the people who run the place) and the dining and entertainment halls. For the first few weeks, you tend to keep making sure your mum has been found a place at lunchtime or dinnertime, until the carers politely let you know you can stop bothering them.

Mum used to love her parish church-sponsored tombola. Inside her new “home”, tombola sessions are held without her even noticing it. The entertainers show up on special days of the year, like Easter and Christmas. There is a popular Maltese saying that says that we become children twice in our lives, and you can clearly see that on this planet. Magicians fascinate them, guitar-playing singers have a frustrating time trying to get a chorus, however disjointed and rugged, for their old popular singalongs. The carers serve pizzas and pastizzi, the floor is swathed with leftovers while rivulets of Kinnie and orange squash leave serpentine images on the cheap marble.

Some inhabitants simply refuse to stay off the plot in your story. Like the ever-smiling lady wearing a mini-skirt over a scruffy pair of jeans who never utters a single word as you go into or come out of the lift. She is the “Nowhere Man” the carers are always looking for; no doubt aware she could make a run to the exit door at any given moment. Or the blind, well-educated woman who is always sitting on her own reciting the holy rosary. And the octogenarian whose latest-model HD TV set in his room won’t work and you feel obliged to check, only to find it couldn’t possibly do so as the power supply socket was in off mode.

Like the old priest who listens to the most beautiful Gregorian music everyday and the grand old lady making tea for the rest of the residents in her corridor in between chatting with every visitor that happens to walk past her room.

There are also inhabitants who simply vanish from the scene. Where is the one who used to recognise you immediately you entered and told you where your mum was sitting? And the overweight one who was eternally eating things she sneaked out from inside her bulging black handbag? And the very athletic-looking guy who went about wearing his 70s-style tracksuit? Have they all gone or are they suddenly bed-ridden? They’d become a part of your scene in your regular visits.

This different planet is, actually, a small part of a growing galaxy in a society that wants to live longer, but for this? Sometimes you wonder whether it is the ideal route out or whether those brave people from the UK and elsewhere who go to that special Exit clinic in Switzerland are doing the right thing after all. A sense of futility grips us all. Happily, it is often countered by the love and affection of a lifetime.

Happy New Year, whatever your age.