Monday, November 20, 2016

Imagine being in a state of perpetual bewilderment. This is what I think mom is experiencing. She is pretty graceful about it on the whole. The worst part is that she calls one or the other of us constantly during the day and night. We agreed that cleaning up poop is something we have learned to manage, but answering her constant demands is far more difficult to take.

Imagine still, that you ask a question, it is answered, and you immediately forget what you asked or that you asked it or that you received an answer to it. You smile, you ask again, only to be told that your question was just answered. Repeat this scenario a dozen, no 5 dozen times, and you have a day in the life of a person with severe dementia, or severe memory loss. It must be bewildering, frightening on some level (if you remembered enough that you had forgotten anything at all or that you ever asked the same question over and over or that you had ever received an answer, let alone many answers).

It’s exhausting for me and exhausting for Rob and annoying. How to prevent it from becoming annoying is anyone’s guess. When I try explaining to my mother that I already gave her an answer or already told her what she asked, she smiles and says, “Oh. I didn’t know.” And then she proceeds to ask her question again.

Is there a solution? I don’t know. All the memory drugs in the world cannot make a difference to mom. For us, perhaps earplugs or an office many doors away from her room. But she shouts. She knows how to be heard. Like a child, she is unrelenting and stops only when she has been satisfied, which all too often last only a very brief time.

For those who would recommend coloring, magazines, word search puzzles, television, she is long past most of this, most of the time. There is no solution, save one. And that is a sad one. No matter how annoying mom is right now, we will miss her when she is gone, but we won’t miss the constant interruptions and demands. This is an imperfect world filled with imperfect people and scenarios. I am reminded daily of the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story “The Birth-Mark.” In it, the beautiful Georgiana, who is physically perfect in all ways but for a hand-shaped birthmark on her face, is about to be married. When married, her husband, Aylmer, cannot abide the birthmark and devises a way to eliminate it. Eliminate he does and in the process, kills his wife. When the birthmark is completely eliminated, she dies. The removal of this one flaw killed her. For the high school me, the story was about man’s inability to be perfect while on earth. For the husband in this story, there were more complicated issues related to imperfection and fatal flaws. The initial fatal flaw turns out to be the lovely Geogiana’s agreement to allow her husband to experiment on removing the birthmark from her face.

There is nothing perfect on earth. There are no perfect people on earth. There are no perfect scenarios or solutions on earth. There is no perfect caregiving. Even the pursuit of perfection has at its core a serious flaw: it cannot be achieved.

So if my mother is imperfect and cannot be set right, my reaction to her constant demands—frustration—will also be imperfect. We are not to blame however hard we try to right this scenario. Aylmer lost everything to learn this lesson.