There is more to "coming home" from a vacation than
unpacking, doing all the laundry (and trust me, with no access to laundry facilities,
EVERYTHING, even the things you hadn't worn yet, smells!), and restocking the kitchen
because you tried to run out of everything before you left, so nothing would go bad while
you were gone.
Everyone had told me I could put my concerns for my mother behind me
while we were gone and I didn't really think I would do that. I still sent her
e-mails every day (which she forgot receiving) and I was worried about her, but it wasn't
until I walked into her apartment on Sunday to have the same conversation that we have
been having every day for the last couple of years, that I realized that I really had
put all that aside and had managed to have a "Mother vacation" after all.
I went and saw her yesterday for awhile and brought some postcards to
show her, and brought her toilet paper (how she managed to go through five rolls of paper
while we were gone, I don't know!). She was also out of ice cream, I noticed and she
said she needed paper towels, so today I got those for her yesterday and planned to
deliver them today.
I'm still having jet lag, I guess. I don't think of it
as jet lag, but I do nap a lot and I managed to fall asleep around 1, waking at 3, with a
start, and realizing how late it was. I considered skipping today, but I had all the
stuff to take to her, so I literally staggered out to the car. I was still half
asleep when I pulled up at Atria, though the chat with the girl at the front desk (who has
never heard of Istanbul) helped wake me up, and off I staggered to my mother's apartment
The problem was, I think, that she had been sleeping too and
was as groggy as I was when she answered the door.
So there we were, two groggy people, one with dementia, trying to
have a coherent conversation.
In my cheeriest voice, I said that tomorrow was our big day, the day
we go to the Brain Gym again. She said she's not going to go. She hates it.
She doesn't need any help because her brain is fine and she realizes I'm trying to
help her, but she is never going to go there again. So...so much for help with her
brain, which apparently is just fine. I'm disappointed. I thought that was
going to be our "thing," going to the brain gym and then to lunch, but it was
only my thing. Time to give up and let her just deteriorate.
The ironic thing, which she would never see if I pointed it out to
her, was that when her mother-in-law moved into an Atria-like facility my mother spent
years so frustrated with her because the facility offered so many opportunities for her,
but she refused to interact with people and all she did for years was sit in her room
asking why she was still alive and wishing to die. But if I pointed that out to her,
she would not see that she is doing exactly the same thing.
There is a birthday dinner for all with September birthdays coming up
and I asked if she was going to go to it. She just looked at me like I was crazy. Go
interact with other birthday folks? WhyEVer would she do that?
Ed had been there yesterday, apparently and brought up the last of
her stuff, in boxes, on a cart, with a note that it was for me.
You would not believe what happened.
She slouched in her chair, glowered toward the boxes and said
"Stuff," with all the venom she used to use for "all this crap" in her
house. She said she didn't know what was in the boxes and I said I didn't either,
but when I took them home, if there was anything I thought she wanted, I'd bring it to
her.
Then she said something like: "Well, when I moved here,
you told me to just leave everything behind and I did. You said I wouldn't be
needing it. But how do I know there's nothing in those boxes I might need?"
She then suggested that we go through a box a day to make sure she didn't need
anything.
I told her that the thing that botherted her most about her old house
was all the "stuff" in it and that she hadn't needed any of it for the past four
months, so she obviously didn't need anything that was in any of the boxes.
She got very huffy and said I didn't understand what it was like to
leave it all behind and that she really felt she needed to check the boxes to find out if
there was anything she really wanted. I pointed out that even if there was,
she had nowhere to put it in her new apartment. I was very, very angry with Ed for
putting me in this position when he could have let me know he was coming and delivered
these boxes to my house.
She then got very angry because I was keeping her from her stuff.
But as I have said before, there is an up side to dementia. I tried to find a
subject to talk about other than the big pile of boxes in her room and she was easily
distracted. But I really needed to be out of there, and I definitely needed to get
rid of those boxes or she would have them all opened in no time.
When I got to the car and started loading them, I realized that they
were all boxes of photos, the photos I told Ed to just throw out because I had no place
for. When I called him later, he told me that they looked like they might mean
something to someone and he couldn't bear to throw them away.
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