The Dementia Heist

By | December 8, 2018

Hiding with my older sister in her S.U.V., I’m nauseated. We’re committing a heinous crime. Twenty feet away, I see a paramedic escort my silver-haired mother into the memory care center, a nursing home for patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s.

We’ve tricked Mom into coming here because she’s not safe living alone. Moments before, we set up her room with photos and labeled her clothing. Nurses recommended we stay out of sight. I feel like the worst daughter.

But according to doctors and social workers, we’re doing the most caring thing.

Even as a child, my relationship with my mother was volatile. I constantly navigated her unpredictable emotions. To encourage positivity, I complimented her cooking, dressed like her mini-me, and parroted her disdain for our unassimilated Russian relatives. Good moods meant she’d share apple slices over a Doris Day movie, fry me blueberry blintzes, or help me fashion opera gloves from bubble bath while sitting next to me in the tub. Bad moods meant an endless cycle of slaps, me prostrating myself and her forgiving.

I always knew that my mother had had a hard life. As a girl in Russia, she watched her father bleed out after Nazis bombed the local railway station. At 27, she fell from a train, shattering her kneecap and almost dying from gangrene. She’d dreamed of becoming a singer, but instead married my father, an old bachelor and “the only man who’d marry a cripple,” my grandma said. In 1964, they abandoned everything with little money to immigrate to the United States.

Although I understood the source of my mother’s bitterness and inflexibility, our difficulties persisted. As an adult, I moved 1,700 miles away and visited annually to limit strife. Unlike my sister who understood that peace required diplomacy, I stood my ground, hoping it would yield my mother’s respect. On one visit, we saw “La La Land,” and I refused to agree with her that the film was boring. My mother threatened permanent silence, declaring that I was no longer her daughter. I countered by waiting weeks to call.

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I fantasized that someday we’d stop fighting and have a closer relationship, but then came the dementia. My sister, who lived nearby, kept me updated. First, my mother forgot the word “dog.” Then she got lost on the way home from the grocery store. There were hallucinations of flashing lights at 2 a.m. and strangers in her bedroom. Eventually Mom, a talented cook, stopped eating and dropped 20 pounds in a month. Her refrigerator was bare except for a wall of empty butter boxes she’d taped shut.

Two doctors diagnosed dementia and recommended 24-hour care, which she rejected. She’d fallen several times, couldn’t write a check or drive. My sister silently drove her to physicians, paid bills, bought groceries and took the blame for my mother’s deteriorating mind.

Then Mom called the police on her new caregiver, a gentle Polish woman who she claimed broke into her apartment. My sister worked hard to enable her to stay at home, but she was constantly getting demanding and confused phone calls from Mom during her workday. She couldn’t juggle my mother’s multiplying needs with her family. Our choices were to let her die alone from starvation or trick her into memory care.

Days later, my sister and I toured memory care centers. One smelled of urine and industrial cleaner with wheelchair-bound, despondent seniors. At $ 100,000 a year, it was one of the nicer places. They sent us home with a pecan pie to seal the deal.

We found a better facility with a B&B vibe and patient staff members who gave lots of hugs. My sister signed a 40-page contract making her liable if Mom injured another resident or destroyed property. We negotiated her level of care because bathing assistance bumped up the monthly price by $ 1,000. It felt like buying a car instead of caring for the woman who spoon-fed me chicken soup when I was sick.

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Next, we needed to get my mother into the center. We had her admitted to the hospital, blaming her high blood pressure. Then, we said the doctor wanted her to go to physical rehab. Professionals call it “therapeutic lying” because honesty can increase dementia patients’ anxiety.

In the hospital, I tried to feed her a bite of babka, but she had time-traveled to the Battle of Kursk. She was 14 years old, crouching behind a bush as a German fighter plane gunned down fleeing children. It was frightening but affirmed our conviction that this move was necessary.

Once she was in memory care, we couldn’t contact her for an agonizing 10 days to help her adapt. But we got reports: Mom wouldn’t sleep in her room, parking herself in the lobby all night. She refused to eat. We worried that if she kept starving herself, she’d be sent to a more depressing, regular nursing home.

Then, she refused medication, claiming the pills were making her “lose her memory.” The staff hid meds in her food, but she resisted her glaucoma drops, risking blindness. When I visited, she was belligerent, insisting I take her back to her condo.

I was flooded with conflicting emotions. As our family Napoleon, my mother always forced her way. Now she was destroying her health to compel us to take her home. Seeing her in this fragile state, I wanted to give in.

But I’d have to close the small business my husband and I built over 14 years and move home. I’d have to check on her every half-hour to ensure she didn’t fall. I’d have to bathe her, force-feed her food and meds and absorb her ire. A better person would make this sacrifice.

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Three weeks later, we visited to celebrate my mother’s 89th birthday. We ate cake at a courtyard table beside a classic convertible. She complained that everyone there was crazy, so we changed topics — another strategy for dealing with dementia patients. My husband mentioned our wedding. “You got married?” she said, “Congratulations! I’m so happy for you!”

I wanted to correct her, reminding her that she had walked me down the aisle 14 years prior. Instead, I stroked her hand. My eyes got wet. Wrong and right were one and the same. This next chapter of her life would be painful. My only hope was that she’d become enveloped in a pleasant memory.

My mother’s face lit up and she laughed. She kissed me and held my husband’s bearded face in her hands. “You married such a nice man!”

“I did,” I said. As I hugged my mother goodbye, I wished we could live in this moment forever.

Marilyn Friedman is a writer and co-founder of Writing Pad, a creative writing school in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and online. She is working on a memoir about swing dancing.

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