Memory is a thing often sung about. It is also blogged, scrapbooked and fondly reminisced about between old friends.
The virtues of forgettory are, however, rarely extolled, which is a pity, without it our lives would be unliveable. Unless you are that unusual human, the one who has never wronged any other living creature, forgetting that you have done so makes your life bearable. Imagine if you had to live every moment in the full knowledge and experience of everyone you had ever slighted, made an unkind joke of or been less than kind to or about. Could you go shopping for the Sunday roast with everything you’ve seen or read about slaughterhouses at the forefront of your mind?
Forgettory is the kindness that lets you start each day afresh and rise to meet the sun with a lightness unburdened by the weight of past sins. Forgettory in dementia is essential to the sufferer though not as readily available to innocent bystanders.
The visit yesterday started badly when my mother got me out of the shower to shout down the phone that if I didn’t come and stay I could drop off the planet and then she hung up on me. So we went, as you may imagine, with heavy hearts. I am fairly certain by her behaviour for the rest of the visit and what the carers tell me, that she has had another mini stroke. Over the last few days she reports waking early so drenched with sweat that she has to get out of bed and get changed and finish the night on the settee. From this I might deduce that the part of her brain affected this time is that concerned with temperature control. It has been the greatest blessing that these mini strokes have not, so far, affected speech, motor control, continence or any of the abilities we dread a stroke waltzing off with. Usually she just has a few days very poorly and aggressive and then normal service, albeit at a perceptibly lower level, is resumed.
She was wary at lunch as if she knew she had done something awful but couldn’t quite say what. After lunch I explained gently that I couldn’t stay because she seemed reasonably vigorous to me (though I had in fact gone with the essentials to stay overnight in case she was dying as she had claimed.) The soi disant dying woman ate a bowl of soup the other half had made and taken for her, the Marks and Spencer’s individual bowl of pasta prawn salad I always take and half a bowl of crisps, a cup of tea and a glass of water. After I had explained that I didn’t think I needed to stay she began crying and refused to leave the dining room, look at the shopping or anything else.
I may seem to be very cruel depriving her of company but she had had the chance the previous day to have wonderful company. My cousin’s son had volunteered to drive his mother fifty miles to see her and fifty miles back again, it was all set up and agreed and then on the day my mother decided she couldn’t be bothered. I know, the carer’s knew and so did my mother that this would have been a visit for my cousin to say goodbye to my mother. The carers said, on what would have been the afternoon of the visit, that my mother had been as well as she had been at any time. Could she perhaps not face saying goodbye? It is typical of her before dementia to be incapable of looking at the visit from the point of view of anyone but herself. I remember thirty years ago when a friend died in Nottingham after we had moved to Aylesbury, we delivered the S&H, then two, driving across country eighty miles to her. She put us up on camp beds and the floor because she was entertaining the neighbours from three houses previously and was delighted to explain in detail how very inconvenient it was for her, even though the neighbours had already stayed for a week and were leaving that afternoon. We then drove across country another hundred miles to the funeral, then back to my mother, who was at pains to tell us how difficult it had been to take her afternoon nap (she was fifty seven at the time) because the S&H kept lifting her eyelids up and asking if she was awake. So, considering the convenience of others has never been a strong motivating factor for my mother.
Anyway yesterday afternoon she was being so odd we would have left at speed had the carer not reminded me that I had booked the cat in for his annual service at the vets that afternoon at 4. So we waited with my mother moaning and crying in the dining room and telling the carer how bad I was. My other half read his kindle, I just waited. At four I loaded the cat into his basket to a litany of: This is my cat, he is not to go to the vet, he is not to go out of the house, I forbid it, etc. and so forth. Ignoring all of that we got the cat into the car and took him to the vet. The vet was fine, the ancient cat was fine, he was even better than last year when he had a urinary tract infection. Delivered back to the house I reported that all was well with the cat and put him on my mother’s knee. He jumped off but she could see he was all right and then she had a cup of tea and got quite chatty. By the time we left she was back to normal.
We returned after a wait at the road works en route for an hour and a quarter in the pouring rain. So it was a journey of an hour and a bit turned into two hours of misery. I didn’t even go for the take out, I just turned the heating up and found something in the fridge. It’s not good to sit in a house with a demented person raving in the next room.
This morning I phoned in some trepidation. She was fine. She had just had her hair done, thank goodness for the peripatetic hairdressing friend. She was chatty but wasn’t sure what was in the fridge and couldn’t remember why she didn’t know. Had she been poorly yesterday and not looked?
So you have to let it go. There is no point in reminding a person with no memory that they spent the previous day being hysterical and aggressive towards you because to them it didn’t happen. I find for me it helps to blog it and forget it. Each day new minted, each phone call got through with all the grace I can muster and then forgotten too.
One of the ways of dealing with someone else’s dementia is to live in the moment. Let past hurts wash down the river of forgettory and under a hundred bridges, cross each bridge as you get to it with a light step and be thankful for the carers and the health of the ancient cat and take the day after a visit as right off as you feel.
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Jane Laverick.com – enduring practice is practice in enduring.