elderly

September 26, 2019

Birthday Card Blues

My mother’s birthday is this coming Monday.  And as it is the first one since my father passed away, I want to do something somewhat special.

I started to roll through all the usual things, a trip to her favorite restaurant, some clothing that is comprised of some gaudy printed top and bright colored, flashy pants, and … as I thought about getting her the usual birthday card, I stopped and began to cry uncontrollably.

Since my mother’s dementia has progressed her ability to read has significantly decreased. I got her a card for mother’s day which she never even opened and instead focused only on telling me how much she didn’t like the 4 out of the 5 tops I picked out for her. (Which is absolutely out of character for my mother. She used to be the kind that would rather die than tell someone she didn’t like a gift.)

My gut reaction was truly puzzling to me. Yeah, it’s sad that she can’t read, but I didn’t understand the overreaction. Most of the time I usually just feel the ache in my chest and move on. As I picked it apart (as I tend to do with most of my thoughts) I realized two different things.

The first realization had to do with my weird obsession with birthday cards. For a few years I would actually buy two. One that reeked of sentimentality and the other that was a giant joke. And with the sentimental card I would write a long paragraph about how much the person meant to me. The last few years, as cash has been tight, I boiled it down to one and stuck with my schmaltzy reflections.

Those days are gone with my mother.

That last piece is what led me to the next conclusion…

I want to be a published author and if I ever get off my lazy ass and finish editing my “completed” novel, maybe one day I can achieve that goal. And if I were to do that, no matter the subject matter, I would want my mother to read my book. Which, even now, would be a miracle if she could. She would pretend she was understanding, maybe even put a bookmark in to complete the ruse, but ultimately she would not. The only thing I could do was read it to her. Which would be sweet but… I broke down crying over the idea of a birthday card. How the fuck am I going to read her my novel?

This birthday I will just skip the card, and instead provide her the one thing she has been severely lacking, companionship.

September 20, 2019

An Adult Girl

I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that my mother’s mental state is very much that of a little girl.

Last night was one of my newly designated evenings to spend with her, in an attempt to lessen the loneliness she feels since my father’s passing. I go over after work, we have dinner, and we do some sort of activity. Lately we have been coloring but for whatever reason, I wasn’t feeling up to it last night; however it probably would have been a good idea.

Instead of the usual business we ended up watching T.V. There was a Friends marathon on the Paramount channel. (Had no idea that was a thing now.) It was playing some of the “best of episodes” to celebrate it’s 25th anniversary. (By the way, I need you to kill me, because I am officially old as fuck.)

I thought the re-watch of the show would be good for her because this used to be the show she and I would watch together every Thursday night. My mother loves/loved a comedy. Especially when they’re romantic ones. And I thought maybe the familiarity would be comforting for her.

During the re-watch she would giggle where it was appropriate, almost like she was waiting for me or the laugh track to initiate it. During the commercials she would titter at some of the more bizarre things that I couldn’t understand why she found them so comical. At one point she turned to me during the end of a Chase commercial to ask me if I had had that drink. To which I responded, “nope, I haven’t tried that Chase drink.”

I feel like an asshole sometimes with the way I respond to her strange questions. I am being relatively cruel, but I don’t think she’s even picking up on my sarcasm. She’s very much in her own world.

While I was making dinner she excitedly pulled out a thing of mashed potatoes she had made the week prior. She put them in the microwave and set the time for 5 minutes, which I’m sure is entirely too long but… whatever. She didn’t let the clock run out. She kind of kept an eye on it and turned it off when she thought it had been in long enough. However, then she completely forgot all about them until I remembered that they should be thrown away.

When I suggested tossing them she looked visibly distraught, but then waved her hands and agreed. And as I threw them away she rushed into the kitchen, grabbed the pot I had used to boil hot dogs (her favorite way of preparing them), filled it with water, and then dropped 4 unpeeled, unwashed potatoes in and began to boil them. To top all that off she got an over-sized lid and placed it on top.

I asked her what she was doing and she said she was making them for my cousin (who was supposed to arrive the following morning.)

Once I announced that the potatoes were done (I had no idea, I just wanted to go and didn’t want her using the stove before she went to bed because she’s already left the gas on overnight once before) she hurried in there and started to “peel” the scalding, boiled potatoes with a knife held at a 90 degree angle. Her idea was to literally scrape the skin off. I tried to help her and then she got annoyed with me, splashed them back in the pot and announced that she would continue tomorrow morning. She wanted them to be “ready when my cousin arrived.”

My cousin has this habit of travelling late at night and sometimes arrives/leaves in the early morning hours. My mother, so excited for his visit heard noises at 3 A.M. and went outside to investigate them in her nightgown. She was out there for 10 minutes searching for my cousin. When she had decided he was not there or the one who had made the noises she had heard, she went back inside.

This I witnessed all at 7 A.M. when i was reviewing the recordings to see if my cousin had in fact kept his word about coming to visit. (My family is notoriously flaky.)

From this experience I have learned I will no longer inform her of visitors. Because of it she gets excited and will do dangerous things that could be deadly. All I do is replay the possibilities of where every action she took could have gone wrong.

September 12, 2019

Midnight Terror

These trials of error with my mother living “on her own” are proving my initial response to be the only course of action.

That past few days she’s missed her anti-psychotic pill. Either it gets caught in the crook of her finger and she misses it, or she’s deliberately not taking it. I don’t believe it is the second because she’s very good when given instruction. Regardless, it has brought back some of the hallucinations.

The woman we hired to intermittently care for my mother throughout the day informed me this morning that my mother told her that she awoke to a man standing in the room and a disembodied female voice telling her “he’s not supposed to be here.” This little episode holds true to a video I previously viewed last night.

After Jessica (the caretaker) spoke to me on the phone about the missed medications, I went back through the recordings to see if she had woken up at any odd hours, which indeed did happen. I noticed that she had awoken at a quarter to one, and when I viewed it I saw my mother panicked, rushing from the bathroom whispering “oh, god. Oh, god.” She hurriedly climbed into bed and wrapped the blanket around her. The video ends there. So I don’t know what else had occurred after until the next video showed my mother moving in her room at 3:30 that same morning. Upon reviewing those I just saw her organizing the things in her bedroom, which she tends to do during a manic episode.

There was only one video from last night where she awoke, again, around 3 A.M. In it she is standing at the edge of her bed looking around at what seems to be an unfamiliar place. There is panic etched into her ghostly white face. Again, the video stops recording before I see what she does next. However I can only conclude she got back into bed because the next video recording isn’t until 6 A.M.

All of this could be remedied by getting her into an assisted care facility. I haven’t broached that subject with her (even still) because she is adamant, without hearing the term “facility” or “home,” that she wants to be at her house. And I understand that. She wants familiarity during a time when she’s lost the man she spent 24/7 with while simultaneously navigating losing her identity. I want to give her what she wants but… At what cost? Either I pay an insane amount of money for her to share a room in an unfamiliar place, which would cause terror, or continue on this current path and have her terrified there.

Every day I curse “god” and life for laying this bullshit at my feet. I am caught between what should happen and what my mother wants. I want her to be happy, but in the end nothing seems to make her happy. The one thing I dread doing is moving the husband, the K-9 brood, and myself into the house. That I absolutely refuse to fucking do. I keep telling myself “I want to live in MY house,” but isn’t my mother saying the same thing?

August 6, 2019

Coming to you LIVE from the Living Room

The hardest thing to grapple with my mother’s illness is that the woman who currently resides in her body is very much not like the one who raised me. This one is more like a petulant child than anything else. She’s argumentative and obstinate, who will do the exact thing you tell her not to do. It’s irritating and upsetting.

Her “caretaker,” for lack of a better word, (babysitter is more apropos but I refuse) doesn’t start until this coming Monday. The plan was that she was going to come and stay with me until Thursday, but last night she flat out told me she wasn’t going to stay with me. So I countered by setting up camera’s in her house.

I must confess they are incredibly handy. I can see most areas of her home and what it is she is doing, which is constant shuffling. And if I so chose I could get alerts to ANY movement. However, as previously mentioned, she never sits down, so the only camera that sends me alerts is the doorbell. I want to know if she goes somewhere, especially since I told her “don’t leave the house.”

The husband and I have dubbed it “The Ginger Show” ala the movie “The Truman Show,” because we can see what she’s doing at all times. And goddamn is it fascinating. Just the mundane things she does, aren’t so mundane when you realize she is mopping the floor with a padless Swiffer. Or she is readjusting the chairs for the third time, even though they haven’t been moved since the last time she rearranged them. But in my mother’s mind she is more than capable to take of herself. In fact, she is completing every task she sets out to do. However she can’t tell you why she thinks that, but she can tell you why she doesn’t use the things she once used, like a telephone or a T.V. remote. I dub this kind of activity “raging against the dying of the light.”

I know she refuses to see herself as old or infirm.  She doesn’t even believe that she has Alzheimer’s. Whenever she talks about it, it’s always “what you say.” I want to immediately counter with “no, it’s what the doctors say.”

When I switch over to the “live view” of whatever room had the last bit of activity and I just take a moment to watch what she’s doing, I am overcome with this immense sadness. Here sits a woman who is quickly deteriorating mentally, who has no concept of what is happening to her and refuses to admit that she needs help. If I believed in any kind of god I would pray she realizes she can’t do this on her own, but there is no greater power in this universe. Maybe there is and like these Ring cameras he just enjoys watching this shit show. But unlike me, he gets off on the misery.