Giddy Girls

I can honestly say that today was the best day at Atria.  Ever.

We had Brain Gymnasium at 10 a.m.  She really didn't want to go, but went and brought the folder I'd given to her.  Everyone seems to bring their "home play" to class in folders and I have all these folders left over from the information they give me when I review a play.  I chose the Wizard of Oz folder for me and the Les Miserables for her, since I told her she looks so miserable when I try to take her to the activity!

I couldn't find my folder, though, and thought I'd left it in the car, so I sent her on to find the class on her own (which she did!).  Turns out I left the folder at the front desk.  The class had sort of started when I got there and Michael was trying to get my mother to remember the date (she and I had gone over that before we left her apartment, but she had forgotten).  

My mother was doing what she always does when she finds herself stumped.  She made jokes, and laughed about being "95," but this is week 3 and Michael is on to her now and, though kind, gentle, and understanding, would not let her get away with it this time.  For one thing I said that she was 93, not 95, and for another one of the participants in another class is 100 and "sharp as a tack," so he said he's not letting her get away with claiming she's too old to think.

Amazingly, by answering his questions ("was the holiday this month a long time ago or a short time ago?" etc.), she actually got the date right!   We all cheered.  The next question concerned figuring out a date based on knowing what today is.  Once again, she started joking and he wouldn't let her and by God she eventually got THAT answer right too.

We did a couple of geography games and though she struggled, she didn't make any more mistakes or struggle any harder than everyone else in the class--including me.  Michael also made it fun by having us pass around a rubber chicken and if you were left holding the rubber chicken when the timer went off, you lost 27,000 points (I asked him how many you would have left and he said nobody had ever asked him that before).

Anyway, it was fun and she seemed to like it and she actually seemed to be working.  Michael said he could see that she was starting to get it.  No guarantee that this will continue, but I was optimistic for the first time today.

By the time we leave on our vacation next week, when I will be gone for 3 of these classes, I hope to find someone in the class who will volunteer to pick her up for class each week, so she doesn't give up.

I hadn't intended to stay for lunch, but it was Mexican day and lunch sounded good, so I decided to stay.  I'm thinking that eating with her once a week would be nice, not too expensive for her and she knows that she has someone to talk with when I come.

We sat down at a table, which she told me is "her" table (go figure!) because she tries to sit there all the time. In short order we were joined by Loretta, 83, who said she had just come in from a shopping trip and was exhausted.   She is an artist, a former singer, and seems to be a very nice lady.  She and my mother both decided to have wine with their lunch (I stuck to water).

The longer they lunch went on, the giddier they got and the whole thing was just really fun for all of us.  I hope we see more of Loretta, since she seems to be a person who might turn out to be a real friend for her (though maybe I'm being premature about that).

Before we left, my friend Peg stopped by.  She had been eating in a small group on the other side of the dining room.  Apparently Loretta is in her Brain Gymnasium class.  She asked my mother if she had this week's "home play."  My mother didn't know, but I said that she did.  She asked if she could borrow it, and was going to stop by my mother's apartment to get it.  This would be the first resident to come and visit and I hope that it went well.

These are all such tiny little things, but given what I've been observing over the past month and a half, this was such a "normal" day, with my mother participating, fitting in, and making friends.  I am breathing so much easier tonight!

Walt set up a little dining room table for her yesterday.  It is a drop-leaf table that we found in his mother's storage unit.  It nicely fills the only "blank" place in the apartment and she feels that it feels like home and no longer a motel.

In fact, it feels so much like home to her that she sat in her chair today, with me in the other chair and she looked around and said "Bev, what are you going to do with all this crap when I die?"

Sigh.

Sometimes It's Heartbreaking

My mother was a stay at home Mom until I went to high school.   Karen was 4 years younger, so she was in her last years in our 8-grade grammar school.  Up until that time she was the Mom who sat at the kitchen table with a bowl in her lap, peeling apples for her famous apple pie.  She was the Mom who helped us with homework, who helped the Girl Scout leaders when they asked for volunteers, and who kept the house spotless.

But as she was starting to be faced with a mostly empty nest and a difficult husband, she saw an ad in the paper from Bank of America, which was looking for typists.  She went in for an interview and set her own conditions (because of my father's work schedule, she could only work 3 days a week, they would be a different three days every week and she couldn't tell which days they would be until the end of one week).   Amazingly they hired her.

She started working 3 days a week, gradually worked up to a full time job, as she felt more comfortable being away from home, and eventually was promoted to a Trust Officer, an office she held for several years, during which time she was also vice president of the Business & Professional Women's club and gave speeches regularly. 

She was also the treasurer in any organization she joined.  She kept the books for our household.

And so it is heartbreaking to watch her struggle to do simple math problems in the Brain Gymnasium, which we attended today for the first time.  It requires thinking to figure out the problem.  The first was to tell what was the date the day before two days from tomorrow.  Her main problem was that she had no idea what today's date was, but she was so embarrassed.  She didn't notice that two other people in the group had problems with the question too.

We have been attending "Keep Your Brain Sharp," which, to tell you the truth, is just plain boring.  The leader, who is not particularly vivacious, gives assignments like "list the presidents starting with the current one and so backwards and see how many you can name" or "make a list of all the animals that you might see around here."  Then she leaves the room, comes back in, has us read our lists and gives another list. I have been taking her to the class because it helps her brain work, but today we tried the other memory program and it is head and shoulders (and perhaps torso also) above Brain Sharp.

Michael, the leader of this group, is extremely outgoing, charismatic, and very, very encouraging, telling my mother over and over again that there are no wrong answers and that the whole point of the exercises is to get your brain to actually think.

There was another exercise where you named a geographical location that did NOT end in the letter "A" and the next person named a place that begins with the last letter of the previous location.  Everybody had difficulty with that at one time or another, and though my mother had more problem than the others, I would see her working and enjoying it.

There were 3 other people in this class (plus Michael), 2 of whom do not live at Atria, but live in the community and come for the exercises.  They were so incredibly encouraging to my mother and told her over and over and over again how much it helps and how the important thing was to keep coming back because it works (sounds like an AA meeting!)

I had planned to stay for lunch and wait until Alice Nan came to visit.  She was in Sacramento and had not yet seen my mother's apartment, but during the class Walt called to let me know I had to make a change in a review I had written, so I didn't stay for lunch, but came home and went back later.  

It was very interesting to talk with my mother during the hour before Alice Nan arrived.  It was like she had slipped mentally back about 3 weeks.   It's hard to explain, but the things she didn't know about Atria are things she has known well for the last week or so.  I wondered if all that brain work had shaken things up in there and it all needed to settle down again.

She asked me four times where Alice Nan lived now and one of the first things she asked Alice Nan was where she was living now, but basically I think she enjoyed the visit.

While we were waiting for Alice Nan to arrive, she was looking at our "homeplay" (since Brain Gymnasium isn't school, Michael doesn't assign "homework" but "homeplay."  I loved the first one.

 It's like a verbal sudoko, where you have to figure out how to get all the words into the blocks.  I saw immediately how to do it, [spoiler alert...in case you want to do this on your own] -- Once I noticed that "slow" and "went" were the only two words with the letter w in them, the whole thing fell into place instantly.  I wasn't going to show my mother how to do it, but I did explain that she should look for the letter that was in only two words.  It took her awhile to find it, but she did.  I told her she was right and explained about placing those two words and that would make it easy to put the other words in.

It wasn't three minutes before she picked it up again, as if she had never seen it before.  I tried explaining the whole "w" thing to her and she couldn't understand "letter" vs. "word."  When I told her to find the letter that was in only two words, she was pleased to find the rhyming pair "pent" and "went."  The whole exercise she had struggled to understand from 3 minutes before was just gone.

(I should add that the second exercise for us to do is something that totally defeats me.  It's along the lines of trains leaving stations at different times, or something like that.  No way can I figure it out, so my mother shouldn't feel bad that she's "so dumb" because on this exercise I'm just as dumb as she is!  I have been invited to be a regular member of the group, not just to accompany my mother!)

I'm hoping she will make friends with the people in Brain Gymnasium so that when we are on our vacation, someone will remember to remind her about coming to class.  I have already made arrangements with Atria's General Director so that I can send e-mail for her to him each day and he will print it off and deliver it to her, which means that not only will she get a letter from me almost every day, but someone will actually check and make sure she's doing well while I'm away.  This is a huge worry off my mind.

Sing Along

Today it was a sing-along.  I knew that my mother would have fun because they sing the songs she knows and she always enjoys singing along.  Also, the change of address cards I ordered for her had arrived, so I thought I would go over an hour early and we could get some address cards addressed to send to her friends and then go to the sing along.

Well, best laid plans and all that.

She thought the cards were cute but had zero interest in sending them to anyone.  She said she would look for her address book.  I knew right where it was, but she was still totally uninterested, so we didn't do that.  It's not urgent, but that meant we had an hour to kill.

And nothing to say to each other.

She told me a dozen times that she had to get something to go in the big blank space on her wall, maybe a picture with some flowers on it.  I reminded her a dozen times that Ed is going to bring up the picture of a floral arrangement which belonged to her sister and which she loves.

She got started with all the stuff in her house in Terra Linda and said she needed to go back there one more time.  I asked her what she wanted to go for.  She got angry and said that I didn't understand.  She had lived ther 20 years and she has important things that she needed to go through.  I reminded her,as gently as I could, that when she was there last time she didn't find anything that she needed to bring with her and that she had a return of her dizzy spells, her back pain, and all she could do was hold her head in her hands and say that she should not have come back.

She got angry and said she doesn't remember anything like that, but if I say so she'll have to believe me, but she was very petulant.  The nice thing about dementia, though, I've discovered, is that if you wait long enough, she'll forget about it, which she did.

Yesterday, I found her with a stack of old letters in her lap, complaing about "all this crap" and "why did I save stuff like this?"   Turned out to be letters written by her sister, the writer, all of which are little gems, and they date back to when my mother was still married to my father.  In fact, there were some letters written to my father, which were very funny.  I threatened her with death if she threw them away and told her that if she didn't want the letters, I would take them.

I have the idea that she won't be truly happy in that place until there is no piece of paper anywhere. She says that she doesn't feel at home yet and that she still feels like she's living in a motel.

We eventually went off to check her mail and to go to the sing along, where I managed to distinguish myself.  We got there early and sat at two chairs that were a good design for her back.  They had a table between them.  We each had a glass of water.

Eventually the musicians arrived.  Ida Sue, the pianist, is one of the residents and she is helped by her daughter Carol and our David's former kindergarten teacher, Judy.  

Carol suggested we move our chairs closer to the piano.  When I went to stand up, my hip bone caught and I couldn't stand up right away.  (This happens periodically and rights itself within seconds.)  Carol told me she would take the chair for me and when I went to help her, I spilled my cup of water on the rug.   I got the feeling that she wondered if I, too, was a resident!

The sing along was fun, and all songs that I knew very well.  As I suspected my mother entered into the fun and sang every song along with everyone else.

While we were singing, I saw Kendra, who is the wife of Ned's lifelong friend Greg, at the front desk.  I knew that Kendra's grandmother was moving into Covell this week and I left my mother singing and went to talk with Kendra.   Turns out that her grandmother just moved in and when I mentioned that Ned was going to come and have lunch with his grandmother this weekend, Greg said he would check with him and maybe they could include Greg and Kendra's grandmother (who is just a kid by my mother's standards, in her mid-80s),

When the sing along ended, I stopped to thank Ida Sue for her piano playing and my mother spied a woman she recognized and went to talk to her.  I was thrilled!   They seemed to have a nice chat.

I'm having breakfast with my mother tomorrow morning while Walt puts the finishing touches on getting the house ready for Ashley and her furry friends to move in while we are in Santa Barbara.  My mother is feeling sad that I am "leaving her alone."  ("Fine thing...you move me all the way to Davis and say you'll always be around and here you are leaving me alone right away.")

But I have made arrangements for a friend of mine to come and visit her while we're away, and Ned will be there too.  And I will call her every day, to make sure everything is all right.  She's scared that if something happens to her she won't know who to call.

I found out later that she told Jeri I had only been to see her twice since she was in the place.  But I guess that's OK because she thinks that she has only been there three days, not a week-plus.  I won't remind her that I have been there every day since she moved in!

We may be heading into the "difficult" part of settling in.

Some Days You Just Have to Cry

I am incredibly grateful for social media today.  There are SO many people who have walked this walk with their aging parents, and the supportive comments are so helpful. 

• It is hard, Bev. It is unfortunate to go through, but the alternative is worse. Try to laugh with these moments as there will be a day you will wish for them back. Smile You are an amazing daughter to be doing all this.
• My mom's adjustment broke my heart, but the reality was that she grieved losing her independence, which she had actually lost, even at home. It broke my heart, but in assisted living, I knew she had help close by, AND she was much closer to where I live.
• It's a hard road we travel, despite it being out of love. Know that there are others who have walked and are walking similar paths, and you will make it through this transition, even with some bruises and scars. Hang in there.
• I remember the frustration and anger (mine) wondering why my mother couldn't see clearly what I was seeing. Why she wouldn't do what we thought she should do. Sometimes we thought she was pretending. It is very difficult, especially when you are without siblings to assist with the decisions.
• I read your tale of mother's move and settling in and I have to admit, my thoughts were "I'm glad my mother went so suddenly, and while she was still enjoying life and had all her faculties." Then I had a twinge. My adoptive mother spent her last few years in a nursing home with Alzheimers. My sister lived there and dealt with her and all the details. I just saw her once after she got moved there. She had no idea who I was. I think.... I don't know... I guess I was lucky to be so far away and not be in on all the details. Maybe I understand my sister's bitterness and anger a little more now. In any event, for what it's worth, know you have my respect!
• I am feeling for you so much right now. We dealt with my mom's dementia for nearly 11 years. It was often like dealing with a termperamental toddler. So hard to make that reversal from the parent-child relationship.

As I become my mother's mother and she becomes her daughter's daughter, it is so painful for us both.  I miss the mother I once had, she misses her independence. It frustrates her when she can't remember things, and angers her when she can't do what she wants to do.  But she is not aware of 90% of what she can't remember.  She just asks over and over again and while I am more than willing to answer each question as if she hasn't already asked 20 times before in the last 10 minutes, I do realize how emotional draining it is for me.

In the years that we hosted foreign students, I developed a "foreign student" way of speaking, where I slowed down my speech and used very simple English, so that it all sounded conversational but yet was easy for the students to understand.  I have noticed that I am using "foreign student speech" with my mother now.  My conversation is slower, my grammar is more simple, and I automatically repeat vital information during the sentence I'm saying so she hears it twice instead of once.  Sometimes this helps, other times she turns around and asks me the thing I've just told her twice.

But you really can't be impatient with her.  It's certainly not her fault that she can't remember, and I know that it embarrasses her when she can't.  I try to find ways to remind her without letting her know that she has forgotten. I also try to make it a big funny joke when it is ME who gets something wrong and when I forget something.

I've decided that I really need to have breakfast with her every morning for the next week or so.  In addition to the fact that the breakfasts are really good! and that they aren't charging me for them right now, I never know what I'm going to find in the morning.  The first morning she was disoriented and scared.   The second morning she was asleep and when she woke up and saw me everything was fine.  Today she was dressed, but didn't know if she should go to the lobby for coffee or not and was so happy to see me.  I reminded her she could have made coffee and she said she didn't have any ground coffee, but I reminded her of where the bag from Peet's was and that she did, indeed, have coffee.

But today she was insistent and angry.  She wanted to return to Terra Linda TODAY.  She has THINGS TO DO and important things she needs to bring back to Davis.  When I asked her what they were she said "I don't remember, but I know they are important." I asked what was so important that couldn't wait a few days and she just insisted that she needed to do it NOW.  

She decided she would go home with Ed when he stops by to see her this afternoon.  She'll spend a few days there.  I reminded her that she won't have a car and that her chair will be in Davis and there will be no place for her to sit to rest her back when it starts hurting.  She'd find some place, she insisted, but there were THINGS she needed to do RIGHT NOW.

I finally got her to agree to wait until Friday when I said we could call and make a hair appointment with her hair dresser, whom she usually sees on Friday.   We called Hannah and rescheduled her appointment from 9 a.m.to 2 p.m.  That seemed to settle her down a bit.  I also left a message for Ed warning him that she was going to ask him to drive her to Terra Linda.  He assures me he won't do it.

We had a lovely breakfast and then I again steered her to the puzzle table where we worked for 10-15 minutes.  She does love puzzles and I figure if we do this after breakfast every morning she will get that activity imprinted in her head and that will give her something to do out of her apartment. Right now she's afraid of getting lost if she leaves her apartment.

She did answer her cell phone (with which she has been trying to turn off the TV) when I called to let her know I had ordered her AT&T service.  That was a big step forward! Her new phone should be working by the time we get home from Terra Linda on Friday.

She also wants to go to the local CVS store and assures me that she can walk by herself, but (a) she has no clue where it is and (b) there are no benches on which she can rest when her back hurts.  I told her I would take her the first time so she knew where she was going.  She said she had to make a list of "all the things" she needed to buy.  She's been saying that for 3 days now and I keep offering to drive her to CVS, but that seems to be too much for her and she gets frustrated because she can't remember what she needs to buy, but she will make a list.   So far she has not started one.

I'm thinking that if she decides she must walk to CVS herself, I will follow her in the car so I can pick her up when the back pain gets to be too much.   Hopefully we can forestall that for awhile.  Heck, she still isn't sure which way to turn going out of her apartment to get to the dining room; I don't know how she thinks she's going to be able to find CVS by herself.

I came home last night and went to sleep at 9:30, waking only briefly at 1 and then sleeping until 6 a.m.  Everything comes with its perks and this situation is making me so exhausted I'm actually getting SLEEP.

Roller Coasters

Well, this experience certainly is interesting...and definitely has its ups and downs.

When we last left our intrepid heroine, she was happily relaxing in her new home, and said she was going to take her time unpacking boxes so that she could truly make this apartment hers.  She was going to go to get breakfast at 7:30 and would see us for brunch at 11:30.

Sounded great.  I came home and slept like a log all night.

This morning I gave her time to get her breakfast and then showed up at about 8:30, newspapers in hand.  I could not believe it when she opened the door.   Her face was flushed like she had been crying.  There wasn't a light on in the house, all the curtains were closed and she was shaking.  "Oh, thank goodness it's you," she said.  "I just didn't know what to do."

Poor thing. I felt so sorry for her.  She hadn't been to breakfast because she didn't know where to go or even which way to turn when she left the apartment.  She said she had lost the call button that they gave her when she came in (the local Life Line) which she was supposed to wear around her neck at all times but it wasn't there and she didn't remember where she put it.  She hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast yesterday, she said (I knew THAT was wrong, since we all had burritos around 3:30).  She just seemed so terribly helpless and lost.

I turned on the lights and gave her her newspapers.  I took her out to the front lobby and showed her where she could get coffee and some pastry and we came back and talked.  We did an in-depth search for her Life Line, which had just disappeared.   After a frantic search, it was found -- around her neck.  Crisis averted.

When her coffee was gone, she went by herself back to the front lobby to get more.  I considered that a major break-through and I decided NOT to put an arrow on the door pointing in the right direction.

Walt came and took her empty boxes to the dumpster.  The three of us went to their brunch.  I let her take the lead and did not point her where she should go.  She managed to find the dining room all right. It was kind of interesting.  They advertise a carvery station, Belgium [sic] waffles and mimosas, none of which were visible, or offered, but we did have a lovely breakfast.   They had fabulous fried shrimp which was crisp, not soggy, as you would expect from being in a warmer.  Also, the eggs benedict had runny yolks, which I never find in warming trays.  I would have liked a Belgian waffle, but didn't see where I could order one.

A little lady came and sat with us and, I have to tell ya, she made my mother seem like a Rhodes scholar.  I think it also gave my mother an ego boost to discover that this was one of her fellow residents.  It's always nice to find someone more confused than you are! I don't know how long she has been at Covell Gardens.   She did tell us in one of her more lucid moments that she hasn't been there long, but she has lived in Davis longer than Walt and I have (and we've been here nearly 40 years).

I reminded my mother about her "date" with Ron, the ambassador tonight.  She had totally forgotten that, but I hope she remembers long enough to "put on her face," which she said she would have to do.

She still thinks she's going to walk to my house to pick up her car from time to time.  I just let that pass without comment.  

We were going to go shopping for some supplies, like shelf paper, a garbage can and other things that could freshen up the place, but when I asked if she'd rather do that today or tomorrow, she said tomorrow.  She said she had "all the time in the world" to get settled.  And to my utter amazement she said she can hardly remember "that other place" where she had lived.  When our breakfast companion asked where she had come from, my mother looked at me blankly and said "Bev, where did I come from again?"  She had unpacked her shoes and put them away without a single comment about shoe choices, and most amazing of all, she said that maybe after three weeks or so, when she had her apartment all straightened out, we could go back to her other place and stay the night and get some cleaning done.  I tried not to express shock at that statement, given that she was adamant yesterday about going TODAY to clean it all up.

She also said that she didn't understand why the movers had gotten lost trying to find her house yesterday when it plainly says "260" on her mailbox and on her house.  Only 260 is not her house number.  I didn't mention that she had forgotten her address!

Of course, I know full well that she could totally change tomorrow and demand to be taken "home".  I am avoiding saying "home" at all with regard to Terra Linda, but just calling it "Terra Linda."  There are a couple of vital things I forgot to take, like the charger for her cell phone (tho if I can get her land line installed this week, that won't be a problem) and her address book.  If I think of a couple of other things, I might drive back there without her and pick them up, but hopefully I can just have Ed bring them.

When we left around 1:30, I told her I would go to Peet's and get her some coffee so she can make her own tomorrow.  I did, and by the time I got back to the apartment, she was asleep on the couch, so I just left the coffee on the counter and let myself out quietly.

I'm looking forward to getting a report on her "date" tonight and whether she meets new people, so I'm having breakfast with her tomorrow morning.  I think I'm going to take her to see The Great Gatsby on Wednesday.  It's playing in town and it seems to be the sort of movie she would really like.

T.G.I.S.

That's "thank God it's Saturday."  If it's Saturday, it means GRANDMA IS MOVED!!!!!!!!!

It was not exactly easy and there are many rough patches ahead, but when we dragged ourselves out of the new apartment, leaving my mother looking like death warmed over and feeling like that ourselves, the house looked good, she seemed satisfied, and we had so many people to thank for making it all work as well as it did.

My cousin Niecie took her for a long drive out to West Marin to see wildflowers, the ocean, and have a nice oyster lunch.  That gave Walt and me time to get in and do some packing.  Jeri last week and my mother's stepdaughter Ellen the week before had been working with her, but she had been resisting doing actual packing and though they did get a lot done, they didn't do nearly was much as they wanted to do because she was so resistant.

With her gone,  Walt and I filled box after box, emptying all the drawers of all the pieces of furniture that were coming up here, and moving all the boxes staying into one room and boxes going into another. Walt worked his tail off while I was on the phone canceling her 2 newspapers subscriptions and her Comcast (which is also her telephone service).  That always sounds easier than it turns out to be.  It probably took me half an hour to get that done, during which time Walt had packed a dozen boxes or more.

The first battle was over shoes.  My mother LOVES shoes, and working in a thrift store for 20 years, she was able to buy lots and lots and lots of shoes for not very much money (though the idea of wearing used shoes makes my skin crawl, she loves it)  But there are shoes in the collection of >50 pairs that still have the sales tag on them and shoes she will never wear again (high heels).  I don't know if it was Jeri or Ellen, but someone got her to separate out the shoes that were going to Davis and the shoes that were going back to the thrift shop.  There were two boxes, one marked "shoes for Hodge Podge" and one marked "shoes for Davis." 

Well, she went ballistic when she saw the two boxes.  WHO made that decision. SHE had never been asked. She was going to have to go through both boxes again. She insisted that she was NEVER consulted on the decision and was afraid the wrong shoes would go to the wrong place.  When she calmed down, I moved one box into the "stay" room and into the "go" room and she seemed to forget about it, though she did remember after we got to Davis, but the fire had gone out of her protestations by that time.

She also got furious when she was told (not for the first time) that she would not be able to have her oven hooked up or bring her microwave.  She asked (not for the first time) why not.  I explained (not for the first time) that her doctor had given her the diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (good thing she didn't know that the first diagnosis was dementia!) and the place does not permit machines which might accidentally be misused and cause a fire. She was angry and embarrassed, but couldn't fight it--it was her doctor's diagnosis.  She was highly indignant and said her doctor never even tested her, but she doesn't remember that she has tested her a couple of times. So hard for her...

Another battle was over the "stuff" left behind.  The watchword for the weekend was "I'm so glad we can take our time going through all this stuff.  We don't have to decide everything today."  But by that, it turned out, she meant that we would move all of her things to Davis and then tomorrow we would go back for another few days and finish cleaning up the house.  I told her absolutely not.  She was going to stay in Davis for a week.  A WEEK???   She couldn't possibly wait that long.  She wanted to go back right away.   

I finally solved that problem by pointing out that we had both been under such pressure for so long that we deserved a week off, that she could take six months, if she wanted, to clean everything up, if she didn't mind paying an extra   $6,000 rent to do it.  That took the wind out of that particular sail.   Even moreso because I left a lot of boxes to be unpacked and things arranged the way she wants them in her apartment.  She wants to take her time and do it right and obviously if she is getting her apartment in order, she can't be cleaning up her mobile home 70 miles away.

I discovered that she doesn't so much want to just give things to Hodge Podge, but she wants to give them to specific people.  The kitchen counter was filled with things like half used packages of birthday candles, paper coasters so old they had lost their color, rusty tape measures, lots of pencils and other detritus that she doesn't want to throw away, or even to give away to HodgePodge because she wants someone she knows to want all this crap.  I can't seem to make her understand that everybody she knows has been offered stuff and they all suffer from the same syndrome:  too much stuff, and nobody has any desire to add more stuff.

We went out to dinner and then Walt went home.  I would follow the next day driving my mother's car, which we would then keep. Well, THAT wasn't going to go over either. She needed to drive her car. She needed to visit friends (whom she hasn't visited in 2 years), she needed to go shopping in San Rafael (for what?), she needed to go do some things at the thrift store, where she hasn't worked for a year. I know this is really, really hard for her, maybe harder than moving.  Thank god Covell charges for parking spaces and it really is silly for her to pay for parking when she can park in our driveway for free. She thinks she is going to walk to our house whenever she wants the car, though she doesn't know how to get here and there is NO WAY she could walk that far without her back giving her fits. I suspect we will be dealing with the car issue for a long time. I really don't want to tell her that her doctor told me six months ago that she needed to stop driving NOW and that I should hide her car where she couldn't find it.

Ned and Marta came down early this morning and were such a huge help, especially Ned.  I don't think we could have done things as efficiently as we did without him.  I was grateful to him many, many times during the day for all of his expertise.

The movers did a super job, but were halted briefly when they went to move the piano (which they moved HERE) and found a dead mouse under it.  Ned says that looking at the inside of the piano it was clear the mouse had been living in it for some time.  In fact, there were several pieces of furniture that we moved which had shocking amounts of mouse droppings under them. Obviously Stuart Little had been having a gay old time in that house for a very long time!

But we eventually called it a day, packed up some of the live plants, and headed off to Davis, through Memorial Day traffic.  

A second before I took the above picture, she was sitting there, looking so forlorn, her head in her hands. I felt so sorry for her, but hoped that her mood would brighten as we started setting up the apartment in Davis.

The movers did a great job and, per my request, they moved my mother's special chair in first, so she could sit down and watch the proceedings without hurting her back too much.

It had been Jeri's keen eye which made her take a tape measure to the two beds in my mother's house, and discovered they were identical in size.  We had planned to take the guest bed, thinking it was smaller, but we were able to take her own bed, so she doesn't have to sleep in a "strange bed" tonight.  It fit perfectly.

(and look at that nice garden view she has to look at when she wakes up in the morning!) The floor rug had to go because they can't have any sort of throw rug there...too great a trip hazard.

Tom, Laurel and the girls arrived to check out Gaga's new pad.  They are going to be going to Terra Linda in a day or two to pack up the dishes and the glass cabinet they are in, but for today, they had a good time exploring Gaga's new garden.

Throughout the day, members of the staff dropped by to introduce themselves and give her information about the place.  A guy named Ron, a resident ambassador, came to introduce himself, tell her about things, and invite her to dinner with him tomorrow.  He warned her that he had "lots of girlfriends." Just a really nice, warm, welcoming guy and, of course, attention from a man was just what she needed.

Carlos, the maintenance guy, had been in earlier and got her TV installed, and with most of the furniture in, it really was starting to look like her place...with a lot of boxes.

When we left she wasn't thinking about Terra Linda, but about "taking her time" to unload the boxes, put everything where she wanted it to be, and make this really "her" apartment.

Such an incredibly good sign.  I am bone and brain weary tonight, but happy and feeling hopeful about the future!

Free at Last

Anybody who has traveled the road that I have just barely started on will identify with this, and I really hate to complain again, but today I just really reached saturation.
 
I came home to Davis after my trip with my mother to Springfield Place because the next day I was working at Logos.  Only then I ended up with an intestinal "thing" that made it unwise to be out of the house for that long, so I just stayed home, and must have needed the sleep because in spite of nearly 8 hours sleep at night I also took a good nap during the daytime too.

I drove back to my mother's in the evening.  Her doctor had ordered a Holter Monitor (a portable EKG that records for 24 hrs) that was going to be put on her at 10 a.m. on Friday and removed at 10 a.m. on Saturday.  So I stayed Thursday night so I would be there in time to get her to Kaiser by 10 a.m., and then Friday night to get her to Kaiser first thing Saturday morning to have all the leads removed.

By Saturday morning, when she woke up and handed me the monitor and all its cords, off of her body, and said "I don't know how this happened, but they all came off," I had reached saturation and had to get out of there.  I packed up the monitor, wrote a note to the EKG department, drove to Kaiser at 8:30 a.m., broke into the office and left everything on the receptionist's desk in the darkened office (well, technically I didn't actually break in...the door was unlocked, but there was nobody around).

You know, I don't know how moving to independent living is going to help her memory (though they do have a program that is supposed to help improve memory and I can't help but believe that more social interaction is going to help too) and it's not going to change how often I visit her, or how much I help her with, but if nothing else, it will ease my mind to think that there are people around her all the time (whether she leaves her apartment to interact with them or not) so that if something goes wrong, someone is there to help and she won't have to wait for me to drive 80 miles, or Ed to come, if he's not camping, or her friend Jim to stop by twice a week to see if she is still alive.  She has a wonderful group people, over and above Ed, Jim and myself, who love her and who do lots of things for her, but being with her 24 hrs a day for the past essentially 3 days has made me realize that even though we are doing a lot, it's not enough.

Let's start with the Holter monitor.  I know it's a foreign concept to her, but I must have told her 100 times what was going to happen, including showing her a picture I called up on my cell phone to explain what would happen.  "Where am I going?" "And what am I supposed to tell the doctor" (I told her over and over and over again that we were not going to see the doctor), "where is the office?" "What are they going to do to me?"  "What are they going to tell me?" "Will they give me the answers right away?" I answered every question as if it were the first time she'd asked it, because in her mind it was.   I didn't mind...but I sure got tired of repeating myself so often.

I joke with her about not being able to remember her doctor's name.  Not remembering a name is not unusual (heck, if it were, I'd be in big trouble), but her doctor's name is Dr. Caron and my sister was Karen and both are pronounced identical.

There was the question of what we were going to have for lunch.  We were going to go out.  We were going to eat home.  We would go to the club.   What should we do for lunch?  Should we go to the club for lunch or for dinner? Would I like to have lunch at the club? Etc. 

I had forgotten that I was staying two nights instead of one and had not brought a change of clothes, so yesterday afternoon I found a robe of hers and put that on and washed my clothes, along with the towels I had used during my shower.  When the clothes were dry, she took the clothes out of the dryer, folded the towels and went wandering around the house trying to remember where she keeps towels.  She even checked the cupboard where she keeps her pots and pans.  I didn't want to let her know that I realized she was lost, so I took them from her and told her I had taken them off the towel rack and would put them back.  

When we ran out of toilet paper, she could not remember where she keeps the toilet paper.

And getting old.  My god am I tired of hearing how old she is.   It starts first thing in the morning with "oh god, I'm tired of getting old" then why is she still alive when all of her siblings died a long time ago, do I think her husband is still waiting for her? Why is it taking so long and a whole litany of questions and comments, which are repeated many times throughout the day.  Ironically, this is the very thing that drove her crazy when her mother-in-law (who died at 106) was trying to die...the constant comments about how tired she was of living and how she just wanted to die (though my mother says there are still things she wants to find out about, so she's not ready yet).

This morning the very first thing she did when I went to sit on the bed with her was to point to two tiny blood  bruises, the kind that all old people (me included) get and to ask for the 1,000th time why she got them.  I explained--again--about the thinning of skin and how when older people brush against something it broke a tiny blood vessel, and told her that Walt's mother had them all over both of her arms.  Then she slaps them, tells me she hates them and that she has to cover them up with long sleeves because they loook ugly and that they make her look old and she doesn't want anybody to know how old she is.  

(Despite the fact that she tells EVERYBODY how old she is because she does not look 93 and she gets great satisfaction out of the looks of astonishment and disbelief on the face of everyone.)

Twenty minutes later she is showing me the same bruises and asking me again why she gets them.
We spent a lot of time on "all this crap" in the house and how she wanted it gone now, but when I offered to put it all in a bag and cart it away, she says she's not ready.  Then she says that she's not ready to move, but she just wants all this crap gone.

Gone are the days when we could have a conversation about ANYTHING other than how old she is, how much she wants to die, and how "messy" her house is.  She even only told me the story of my aunt "drunk as a skunk" sitting on the pot in the back yard of her childhood home only once, which is a new record, though I did hear twice about her mother getting a new car--once given to her by my aunt, and once by my mother's uncle (same car, same story, different giver).

The thing that is amazing is that she has developed so many coping mechanisms, ways of being coy or cute or saying things like "Oh, I knew that--I was just having a little joke" that unless you are around her a lot, people think she is better than she is.  I know that salesman Scott at Springfield was convinced she was understanding everything he told her, but when we got in the car, she didn't remember diddly squat.  When I got to her house on Thursday night her stepson Ed was there having dinner.  I said "did you tell him about our adventure yesterday?"   She didn't remember that we had done anything or where we had gone and remembered nothing about the place.

Oh, I know...I know...I know she can't help it.  I know she would be appalled if she realized how much she has forgotten and how much she can't retain, and I really try to be patient with her, but three days of it constantly just got to me and I had to leave before I lost my patience.  I'll be back again on Tuesday, when we are finally doing Cousins Day again.

(My resistance was also probably a bit lower because I hadn't quite gotten over the intestinal "thing" either.)