Unkind Remarks and Good Memories

In denial about her Alzheimer’s, my mother does not understand why she needs to see the geriatric psychiatrist, Dr. S., every couple of months. This comes up fairly often when I’m with her, because during the last visit with him, he asked her to scrapbook an album page and bring it in. I happened to be at that visit and brought up the scrapbooking when he asked my mother how she spends her time. Otherwise I’m not sure she would have mentioned it. He greatly encouraged her to do as much scrapbooking as she likes. It’s good for her in so many ways, using creativity, organizing materials and concepts, rekindling old memories. For a few weeks after that Dr. visit, she kept saying that she didn’t understand why she had to bring in a new page, and even proposed bring in an album she’d done a few years ago. I would patiently explain that he wanted to see work she’s done between visits. At some point, she stopped talking about it and just scrapbooked. She now has several pages done. I’m not even sure if she remembers she’s supposed to bring something to show Dr. S. now.

Dr. S. prescribes Aricept for my mother and monitors the progression of the disease. Clearly my mother doesn’t understand that, but at one time she did understand that she has “early dementia” although I don’t know where she got that phrase. On some level I believes she still knows this. Sometimes when she forgets things she becomes very discouraged and says that she doesn’t know how my father puts up with her. This happens more and more often.

Her incomplete comprehension of Dr. S.’s purpose in her life took an odd turn, I think, during one dinner in her senior citizen community dining room. As I understand it, my parents were dining with another resident who they referred to as a Know-It-All. Ms. Know-It-All, as I’ll call her, apparently learned that my mother sees Dr. S., and said something to the effect that Dr. S. treats people with Alzheimer’s, crazy people. I don’t know what else was said at that time, but the remark clearly upset my mother. Telling me the story, my mother ended it with the total denial that she has Alzheimer’s or anything like it.

At the very least Ms. Know-It-All’s remark was insensitive, at worst, mean and cruel. It’s hard to fathom what she was trying to accomplish. Always prone to denial anyway, it served to tip my mother into Denial River head first. While that in itself is not such an awful or unusual thing, as most Alzheimer’s patients are unaware of their condition during all or most of their illness, such talk doesn’t help her in relating to Dr. S. and certainly isn’t good for her self-image. I’d like to find Ms. Know-It-All and give her a good shake.

But I want to end this post on a more positive note. During my visits, while my mother scrapbooks, I’ve been going through their box of old photographs. At this point I’m just trying to get them out of the old box and into safe storage while roughly sorting them. When I see photos that are very old and have people in them that I’m sure my sister and I don’t know, I ask my mother to identify them then and there instead of waiting. Last time, I found a photo of my grandparents with six other people. The photo looked to be from the 1940’s. When I asked my mother who they all were, she was able to identify all of them. They turned out to be her aunts and uncles, people who are long gone, and who I’d never met. I don’t even think she had met them many times because they lived in Canada and didn’t visit much. I was gratified to see how quickly she rattled off their names. That, I think, was one of the best things that happened during that visit.