After the hour of repetitive conversation with my mother,
which always depresses me, we had a major crisis. When I arrived, her
door was ajar, not closed, which surprises me because you have to make an
effort to leave it open, since it locks automatically.
She was worried, as she always is, because there was
something she needed to ask me, but couldnt remember what it was. Then
she asked me to check her door because there was something wrong with it.
She said she couldn't get it to close and was afraid someone was going to
get angry with her for leaving it open.
I checked the door and it was closed, and told her it seemed
fine, which seemed to calm her. I chalked it up to one of the odd
fears she sometimes has.
Toward the end of the visit, I got up to get her laundry to
take home and wash and I noticed that her room keys were not on the counter
where she keeps them. I didn't say anything, but started looking
around and they were nowhere. She realized I was looking for something
and asked what I was doing. I told her that her keys were missing.
She immediately got what Walt describes as the "kid caught with her hand in
the cookie jar" attitude and told me she knew nothing about it. She
never used the keys. Someone must have put them somewhere.
She helped me look and at one point was standing in the
living room saying "I can't even remember which shoes we are looking for."
I am afraid I yelled at her that we weren't looking for shoes, we
were looking for keys. She was sitting on the couch with her head in
her hands and I felt guilty for letting her know how frustrated I was.
I looked everywhere, but they were nowhere. I even
checked the refrigerator, where Alzheimers patients sometimes put things
like keys. I finally was going to leave her my set of keys when I
thought that maybe she had put them in her purse. Then I couldn't find
the purse. She keeps it in a drawer, but it wasn't there. I
checked all the drawers. No purse. I finally checked her closet
and in a dark corner the purse was there, as were her keys.
I took out her checkbook, which I long ago put in her wallet
to keep her from losing it (that system has worked well). In the keys
search, I had found her AT&T bill and wrote the check for her to sign, but
then found out that the return envelope was not there. I also went to
get the newspaper bill, which I made the mistake of not paying 3 days
ago. It was part of a stack of junk papers that needed to be thrown
away but she wouldn't let me touch because she needed to go through it all.
I pulled the bill out and told her NOT to throw that away. But of
course she did.
The nice thing about dementia is that even when something
unpleasant happens, you immediately forget it, so by the time I had written
the AT&T check and packed up the laundry to go home, stopping to talk with
her about a headline in the newspaper, she had forgotten all the drama of a
few minutes ago. But of course I had not and got into the car
still agitated.
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