I’m so sorry. My mom had dementia, and one of our other relatives had Alzheimer’s. His poor wife eventually had to take him to an Alzheimer’s care unit, too. They had enough money, they hired live-in help for awhile, but it got to the point that there was no safe way to keep him at home any more. If your mom doesn’t have enough memory for assisted living, you’d practically have to have a locked-down section of your house to keep her safe, too. My guess is that you do not have that, do you? Many parents are quite fine with assisted living instead of living with their children, because it is more interesting and they have more independence. When the time is over for assisted living, though, the time for living at your house would have been over, too.
The best and most honest answer for your mom is, “Mom, it would be great to live together, but my house isn’t safe for you.” Do not elaborate, because you don’t want to insult her or invite argument. Just say, “oh, I don’t want to go into it, but trust me, if you knew the situation, you’d agree. It’s not safe.” Well, it absolutely isn’t, so do not feel guilty!
There are two hints I got from a geriatric nurse that helped a lot. One is that distraction is your friend. If you can distract her from an unhappy train of thought or an impossible goal, that is a good way to go. Use that vanishing short-term memory to your advantage, and to hers.
The other thing the nurse suggested is to look for what is bothering her, and address that. For instance, if she’s looking for her mother, of course you don’t want to tell her that her mother has been dead for 30 years. That would be crushing news to her! Instead, you want to get at what has her concerned–“She isn’t here right now. Are you worried about her? Do you need something that she has?”
When my mom was worried about her mom, I’d simply tell her that another family member had it taken care of. She was good with that. You don’t want to imply she ought to have known, though. Instead, you say, “I can understand why you’d be worried, if you thought no one had remembered to pick her up at the train station! That
would be upsetting!Everything is OK, though. You can rest easy. She’s safe, it is all taken care of.”
If your mom wants to see her, you can say, “She couldn’t be here today. I wish she could, too, that would be great. In the meantime, why don’t the two of us talk?” Do not say she can never see her mother again. Say that she cannot see her
right now, and you’re sorry but you don’t have any information about her schedule, so you’ll both have to live with that.
As far as the FBI thing goes, you can listen and admit that you would be worried about that kind of thing, too. Then say something optimistic: “I didn’t see a single FBI guy here today, though. We’re safe right now. Let’s talk.”
One distraction that sometimes works very well is to ask her to tell her a story about her past so familiar to you that you can guide her through it, only act as if you are reminiscing and aren’t quite sure about all the details, either. The farther back, the better she will remember it. If she gets details wrong, that is OK. As far as I was concerned, the whole goal was to get some good hormones going in her brain and get some good thought packets flying around in there, sort of like making suggestions to a dreamer.
That is what dementia always seemed to me that it must be like: being in a dream. The facts don’t make sense, you aren’t always sure what is going on or what has happened, weird ideas come to you all done up in a blender, and you try to do things in the craziest ways, but it all makes sense at the time. Be the person in her dream that listens, believes that she is not lying or crazy, and reassures.
Don’t take anything she says or does more personally than you’d take it if she did it in a dream. Hang in there, too. There is very little chance that she remembers or dwells on any of your conversations with you as much as you do. It is OK to let go. It is OK to remind yourself that she will say things in a demented state that she would never say if she were clear-headed. It is OK to remind yourself that the world is very different than it appears to her, and yet you are both doing your best.
If you can have someone lined up to talk to after you see her, to listen to your worries and then to distract you away from that, too, that would be a good thing, too. As the airlines say, you can’t help anyone else unless your own oxygen is flowing!
I think the Alzheimer’s Association has a website that might be of help to you, too. Another idea is to ask the care center if they know of support groups for the families of dementia patients. The less you feel you are going this alone, the better.
Good luck!
