Page 56 - FDCC_AgingParents

PATIENCE, PLANNING AND SUPPORT: REFLECTIONS ON DEALING WITH AGING FAMILY MEMBERS
the driving, was quite panicked but did her best not to show it to the girls. To hear it from my eldest, this was no big deal – just another part of the adventure – but Mom had quiet discussions with my then-spouse, who became more than
a little concerned about how Mom was describing Dad’s behavior. I was encouraged to “go for a walk” with Mom in the strongest possible terms.
Pausing here, readers may wonder why I did not pick up
on anything unusual much sooner – why my mom did not alert me to the markedly different behavior, etc. Indeed, if I knew my parents well, I’d have seen the signs earlier, asked questions earlier, etc. I later wracked my brain to remember if I had seen or should have seen any earlier warning signs from our all too infrequent family trips. But the truth is, I was not in any position to “see” or appreciate the situation firsthand with that distance.
Nor was his conduct yet troubling enough locally for my older brother to notice or alert me. My brother lived in
the same town on Vancouver Island. Still, he often worked either in the Alberta oil patch as a field inspector or abroad as a safety officer on an oil rig in the Persian Gulf – which made raising his daughter as a single parent a challenge. My parents, therefore, spent a lot of their time helping
with that once they moved out. If anything, with his work commitments, my brother was likely less informed than me, even with an address much closer to my parents.
But the most important bit of information to share and for readers to understand is that I relied mainly on my parents to let me know how they were doing. And we must recognize and account for the fact that we all do this. Our parents, after all, have historically been the ones who told us what to do, how to do it, etc. In this context, our natural inclination is to assume they can take care of themselves unless they tell us otherwise. Now, about that walk with my mom:
It took some doing, and I resorted to “turning on” my well- honed litigator skills to tease out the story from the “witness”
– my mom. What started as her complaining about the state 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
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.
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