March Madness Part 1

March Madness, Part 1 2011

            In March it was getting harder to get Mom to take her pills.  Kathy would put Suzy on the phone, and Suzy would encourage Mom, reminding her that Kathy loved her and wanted her to be healthy and the pills would help her.  Then, while Mom was still on the phone with Suzy, Kathy would give Mom the medicine, which Mom would take.

            “But it will be your fault, Suzy, if I die from what Kathy has put in these pills.”

            Mom also said she didn’t want to be a prisoner in her own home.

            “Would you like to go to a nursing home?” we asked her.

            “I don’t think that would work out.  I’d like to get a friend to live here.”

             She no longer thought of Kathy, the person she'd loved and lived with for longer than the twenty-five years she'd been married to my father, as a friend. 

            Suzy told me that this was the middle stage of Alzheimer, when they go further “away,” and I thought of the movie with Julie Christie, “Away from Her,” based on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came over the Mountain.”  In that movie, Julie Christie’s character asked to be put in a place where she couldn’t get lost, but she never suspected her husband of what he wasn’t doing (although she did use her long-term memory to accuse him of what he had done with younger women, during their married life).

            Kathy had been so faithful!

            Suzy said the paranoia was supposed to diminish over time.

            We wondered about a full-time caregiver, but Kathy was already taking that route with her elderly aunt in Pasadena, and it was more expensive than a home.

             I’d read of a woman whose father, with Alzheimer’s, greeted her with “Jacqueline, you ignorant slut” when she visited him.  I found a description of the Alzheimer’s mind as one having gone “cognitively haywire.”
            Then on Monday, March 21^st, 2011, when Kathy got up around 7:30, Mom was nowhere to be seen, so Kathy quickly dressed and dashed out of the house to find her.  Three police cars pulled up with Mom in one of them.  We knew it had come to the breaking point, and I just kept wishing that the terrible paranoia Mom had, causing her to flee her home and really put herself in danger, were replaced by a blissed-out state because I still believed that some victims of Alzheimer’s actually felt happy and sort of at peace.  I thought Mother still had too much of her brain functioning NOT to suffer.

            Mother called me after the incident with the police and said, “I think I may have done something foolish.”

            We decided to start looking for a “respite” place for mom in Pleasant Hill.