Margaret

...we ran into Margaret, with whom I used to eat whenever I had lunch there (now her table is usually full).  She was happy to hear that my mother was going into the memory unit because she has noticed that she has declined a lot in the last few months.

Dog Day Afternoon

Walt and I decided to go to Atria in the afternoon.  I thought I would bring Lizzie with us so she could distract my mother while Walt was in her bedroom measuring furniture.  As it turned out, no sneaking was necessary since she was sitting in the lobby across from the dining room, so I just took Lizzie down to visit her while Walt went off with his tape measure to the apartment.

My mother has always loved dogs and she was happy to see Lizzie, who was just so good, so gentle and so happy to have someone make a fuss over her.

I lost track of how many times my mother asked if Lizzie was our dog or not and how long we'd had her, but it was nice to have her distracted and to have something to talk about.

There are a lot of dogs who live at Atria and I've gotten to know many of them.  There is, for example, a Boston Bull terrier named,  think, Molly, who lives across the hall.  There is a sign on the door of that apartment letting people know that there is a dog inside and what the dog's name is.

Dogs always attract attention and having Lizzie in the lobby was a great magnet for lots of people who wanted to pet her.  One woman told us about her dog, who had lived at Atria for a few years and now lives with her daughter, but the woman keeps a fenced in yard for when the dog comes to visit.

What was strange about the day was that I swear almost every dog who lives in Atria came by while we were sitting there.

Elizabeth is my favorite.  She's a lovely Dalmatian and everybody loves her, including, apparently, Lizzie.

There was little Chita, a long-haired Chihuahua looking dog who was as energetic was Polly but didn't bark.

There was also the dog I have called a mini-Lizzie because she looks exactly like Lizzie if Lizzie had been bleached and shrunk.  The two dogs' tails wags furiously and they really wanted to play with each other.

My favorite King Charles spanial walked by and both dgs wagged at each other from across the hall, but the person on the other end of her leash didn't let her come over to sniff butts.

Walt finally joined us, having finished measuring everything.  My mother didn't recognize him and I'm not 100% sure she ever knew who he was.  She also looked confused when I talked about Ned and didn't have a clue who that was, and when I explained he was her grandson, she waved her hand and let me know she didn't know what I was talking about (Ned is meeting us at a rose garden in Sacramento tomorrow so we can take her to lunch there and let her enjoy being surrounded by roses).

She did, however, enjoy looking at the picture of Brianna carrying the foodball that I posted yesterday.  Usually when I show her pictures like that she says 'who is that?' but today she just talked about the photo as if she knew who I was talking about.  You just never know from minute to minute who she is going to remember and who she is not.

But the best part of the day was just watching my mother interact with Lizzie and Lizzie seeming to enjoy it.

 
I don't know if dogs can visit in memory care, but if they can, I think I need to bring Lizzie more regularly.  It's not only good for my mother, but for the people around her as well...and Lizzie's a great dog to do it because she's so calm and loving

Hands

There is one characteristic of my mother's that I hate and that is only getting worse as she gets older.  She is a very vain person.  She always has been.  She is from a family of 10, 7 girls, and to be honest, none of them would compete for Miss America.  But for a long time she was the only one who was "citified," who moved from the country to the city, and who, eventually, was taken under the wing of my grandmother whose friends were rich ladies who dressed well and knew how to set a proper table and all those things that go with a certain level of society.  We weren't in that level of society, but my grandmother spent her life trying to live up to it.

I don't remember ever waking up in the morning and seeing my mother without full makeup.  The first thing she did every day was to get up, go into the bathroom, and put her make up on.  She might be cooking breakfast in her bathrobe, but her makeup was on.  I don't think she learned that on the ranch where she grew up!

For most of her life, she went to the beauty parlor every week so there was rarely a hair out of place.  Surprisingly she didn't have professional manicures that I remember, but she was always doing her own nails.

Now, at 97, she doesn't have the same routine.  She can walk about with bed hair, looking like the Wicked Witch of the West and it doesn't bother her, but she is obsessed with her hands.

 

When I left Atria today, I realized I had spent one hour talking (or listening) about her hands.  She's mad at them, you see.  She hates how they look, hates the ropy look of her veins and especially the brown spots.  She picks at them and hits her hands and calls them stupid.

Showing her that my hands look similar to that doesn't help.

 

After she talks to and scolds her hands for looking so old, then she examines her arms and slaps at the brown spots on her arms.  Stupid, stupid, stupid! she tells her arms.  And then it is back to her hands again.  

She will change it up a bit to tell me how ugly her nails are.

 

My cousin gave her a manicure recently but it looks like she has filed the nails down so they are not the way they looked when she had the manicure.  They aren't chipped or cracked, she just doesn't like the way they look.

Then she goes back to examining her hands and how she hates them.  This is a conversation we have almost every time I visit her, but today it was a conversation that went on for literally an hour.

She finally told me that she just realized her shoes had holes in them and I knew it was time to go home before I went stark raving mad.

 
The one brief break from the hour-long diatribe about her ugly hands was when she asked me where the little girl was.  "What little girl?" I asked her and she said "You know.  The cute little girl who is always here."  Not sure where THAT came from!

Power of Attorney

There is a lot more "power" in that term than the title that we sometimes throw around would suggest.  I felt very powerful, signing away all my mother's personal rights in preparation for her admission to the memory care unit next month.

She's going to be very upset and I am having nightmares trying to figure out how to make it all go as smoothly as possible for her.  It reminds me of the weeks leading up to her move to Atria four years ago.

It was the longest conference I've had with Richard, the General Manager of Atria.  We have had our moments when I had to confront him about this or that thing, but this was a congenial half hour we spent together.  I kinda sorta liked him, though when he talked about hoping my mother's rent will be reduced once the tax rate goes from 30% to 15%, I figured that politics was not going to be a good topic for us to discuss.

So now all the decisions have to be made, and behind my mother's back.  She was not happy when I mentioned the move to her (I knew she would not be) and said she would "think about it" and "let me know."  By now she has forgotten.  But I wanted it to be said.

The Principal's Office

Well, it wasn't really like going to the principal's office, especially since the two people I was meeting with were young enough to be my granddaughters.  But it was a serious meeting.  They have noticed, as have I, a decided step down in my mother's cognitive function.  They feel it is time for her to move to the memory care unit and I wholeheartedly agreed.

We talked about particulars and dates.  I asked about how this ordinarily works and they said they find it better if someone takes her out for the day while others move her stuff so that when she returns, she goes directly to the memory care unit and, God willing, her memory deficits will cause her to forget that she was ever anywhere else.

So I hope to do this while Jeri is here next month, because things are usually better when Jeri is along, though today she could not remember either Ned or Jeri, but that will pass when she sees them again

One of the HUGE advantages is that we can move her into an apartment that is as bare as possible and maybe she will stop worrying about "all this crap."  All the crap will be packed into boxes and stored until things settle down and I have chance to go through them.  I will also move most of her furniture into storage, since she's moving into a one-room studio that is small enough that I'm thinking of getting her a new, smaller bed (she now has a king size).

I took another tour of the memory unit, visiting the 3 apartments that are currently vacant.  I chose the largest (slightly larger) and brightest and will sign paperwork on Saturday.  I then told her what we were going to do, knowing that she would immediately forget.  I also knew that she would not (a) understand or (b) approve.  I was right, but I didn't dwell on it.  I just wanted it to be said once.

So all that done, I went to the apartment and found her sleeping in bed, as usual.  I had bought more "junk food" for her for when she doesn't want to go to the dining room (cookies, nuts, and chocolate). I convinced her that she would like to go out to a restaurant for lunch for a change.  And I actually got her up, dressed, and outside.  She was pleased to see the rose garden in front of the building.

Then we drove around looking at gardens in Davis.  It seems every other house in town is having gorgeous displays of my favorite wildflower - poppies!

 

We passed by my house (which she has never seen before--and why have I never invited her to come and visit?) so I could show her the irises growing in the front yard.  They came from bulbs I took out of her sister's garden after Marge's death oh so many years ago (at least 30, if not more).  She said that was "interesting."

Then we drove to Denny's in Woodland, 10 miles away for lunch (cheapest sit-down restaurant I can think of that is also nice).

She often does not go to lunch at Atria, frequently tells me she is sick to her stomach and can't think about food (as she did this morning), but at the restaurant she managed to finish a whole bowl of chicken noodle soup and both halves of a toasted cheese sandwich, which I consider somewhat of a triumph....plus ice cream for dessert!

It was a pleasant lunch, answering the same questions over and over again, but she seemed in good spirits and best of all she was out of Atria for a few hours.

Melissa and Brianna, the Atria staff concerned with her care, tell me that in memory care each resident is checked on every two hours.  Also, since her new mantra seems to be that she needs to be doing something to help someone (instead of "I know I should be doing something but i can't remember what"), they can probably find a job for her to do every so often so maybe she will feel like she has a bit more purpose than she has had in a very long time.  At least that's my pipe dream for the day and it makes me feel better.

On the way home, I stopped at the strawberry stand to buy some strawberries

 

She didn't recognize Atria when I drove up, mainly, I think, because I came in from a different direction than usual.  She seemed at a loss when I told her to get out of the car, handed her her keys and told her that if she couldn't remember where she lived to ask someone.  I felt like a neglectful daughter.

But it was a good day and the first step has been taken to move her to what I sincerely hope that after she settles in will be a better place for her now.  A long time friend of hers told me he called her last week and she had no idea who he was.  Very sad.

New complaint

She seems to have dropped the "I know I'm supposed to be doing something , but I can't remember what" and has replaced it with "I just need to find something to do to help people." While I know it's pointless, I tell her that there are lots of opportunities at Atria, but she will have to actually leave the apartment first. That's when she dials it back to the original complaint...but it gives me something to talk with her about. (If she continues this it's a good thing because it's not the sort of thing that is likely to cause her anxiety)

There was NO dirty laundry to pick up, and some of the Depends were gone from her underwear drawer, so I guess she is using them, though that doesn't keep her from leaving feces stains on the sheets.  I just cover them up.  I can't expect the housekeepers to change the bed every day.

Is this lunch?

I went to Atria for lunch.  Nothings works better than a lunch at the funny farm to cheer one up.  She woke up a little more clear-headed than last time, but wandered around wearing only her pajama tops for about half an hour, trying to straighten out a necklace n her dresser for literally 30 minutes, butt flapping in the breeze.  I finally got her dressed and then to the dining room.  If dementia has ever been something she could hide, it no longer is.  I don't know if the woman who eventually joined us, Betty (someone I had not met before), has dementia or not, but I suspect she does.  My mother asked many times if this were lunch and just lots of stuff like that.  I did a lot of explaining what we were doing today (flowers to the cemetery), who Paul was, etc.  Nothing new.  Just the new normal, with a bit more nudity involved this time.