Page 59 - Aging Parents - FDCCPublications

PATIENCE, PLANNING AND SUPPORT: REFLECTIONS ON DEALING WITH AGING FAMILY MEMBERS
of her marriage, how dad was not treating her very nicely, and her not understanding what she had done wrong at any given point in time to attract his mood changes, sudden about-faces in decision-making, etc., became a theme which I recognized only because I had not heard it before. Pulling it all together for the summary notes at the bottom of a figurative client intake sheet, she described the gradual symptoms of a problem with dad’s health and not, as I had first thought, some problem in their marriage. For lack of
a better term, I will call the symptoms of dementia.10 Once
I realized we were no longer having a conversation about their marriage problems or even the dad I knew, loved,
and remembered, I realized what a burden Mom must be carrying. And so I was then at pains to explain to her that
all of this behavior was collectively looking like a mental health issue, which was most certainly not her fault. She had trouble understanding, and so, to help her own the narrative, we went over her description of a few instances where Dad was not treating her nicely.
One memorable instance she described that solidified it for me was their trip to the local department store. At home that day, they had discussed, and he was firmly settled on buying her a new winter coat since the lining in her current one was getting worn through – so this was something dad had concluded was needed, not mom. While in the store and as Mom was trying one of a few coats she quite liked, he suddenly turned and looked at her almost as if he was angry. He asked why she was trying on coats and said they would not be buying a coat that day, insisting that they leave the store at once. Mom relayed this in the tentative way
of a person who struggles to understand what she said or did to make him change his mind. There were other such instances.
Without belaboring, suffice it to say what started as a dialogue, decision, and conduct aimed to do one thing would, for no apparent reason, suddenly not be what Dad
wanted or what he remembered being interested in doing. To Mom, who was seeing this gradually on a continuum over time, I explained it was like the frog in the pot of water slowly brought to a boil – she did not notice it. To me, by contrast, seeing this unusual track record of behaviour suddenly and for the first time, it was like the frog which jumps into and then immediately out of the already boiling pot of water.
I explained to Mom that she was slowly and gradually but unknowingly witnessing my dad’s cognitive decline because of some health disease or disability. I was presented in short order with key facts that did not add to the dad I remembered. This made it much easier for me to conclude this than for my mom, who struggled with misplaced guilt over what she perceived as dad’s dissatisfaction with her shortcomings in her marriage.
As we discussed more, I asked her to recall anything odd about their trip out to Toronto. She reported that when
they were preparing to go to the Nanaimo regional airport for the connecting flight to Vancouver, she had taken out her passport and put it with her purse on their bed. She then left the room to attend to something else, but she could not locate the passport while her purse was still there when it came time to go.11 She did manage to find an expired passport in a rush, which was accepted in the circumstances as proof of identity at the airport. At the time, she only questioned her own memory and did not think anything was amiss otherwise. She then related her side of the experience I had observed at the airport: Dad, it turned out, had “forgotten” what to do about retrieving their luggage off
the carousel, and so was pushing the empty cart aimlessly around the luggage zone, uncertain what to do until mom persuaded him that their bags were right there on the carousel to be picked up.
Their trip was ending, so I told Mom it was most important
10 Note: I’m no doctor and my dad was never officially diagnosed – more on that frustration below – so I use this term in a general rather than clinical sense to encompass the broad spectrum of sometimes irrational or without cause turns in mood, behaviour and character we lay people learn to recognize as symptoms of a degenerating mental capacity. The current site, https://alzheimer.ca/en continues to include valuable information. Readers should look up their local equivalent if dementia symptoms are a concern, as there are many supportive resources to lessen the feeling of being overwhelmed.
11 For domestic flights within Canada at the time, a driver’s licence sufficed as identification, but mom didn’t drive and had not held a driver’s license since leaving Winnipeg for the west coast.
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