We live in a apartment building with a few units in it, and our immediate next-door neighbor has dementia. Her kids moved her in there about 6 months ago; she lives there by herself, but they do live somewhere in town. We didn’t know that she had any problems when she moved in (i.e. we saw them moving in, but the kids never said anything along the lines of “BTW, our mom’s mind is going, here’s our number if she gets into trouble.” I hardly ever see them (and I work at home, so I see a lot of people coming and going from our building).
It gradually dawned on us through a series of bizarre but mostly small and harmless encounters that she wasn’t quite all there–she asked us to take the trash out from the garage for her, then brought us a bag of trash from inside her house; she shouted “What did you take from upstairs?” at my boyfriend as he was biking away from the house; she said “Good morning” when it was nighttime; she called her cat by about 5 different names and claimed to have 6 cats in her house when she clearly only had one; etc.
We hear her calling her cat all the time, yelling “Kitty! Kitty!” outside and today, we heard her yelling again. I assumed it was the cat, but my boyfriend, who was sitting by the window in the office and could hear her clearly, said she was yelling at a person in the parking lot who wasn’t there.
We went down to talk to her. She was standing on the porch in a sweatshirt (it’s 25 degrees F outside, pretty chilly). She had been out there for a good 45 minutes, at least–I heard her start calling as I got into a weekly conference call for work and we went down shortly after I was done calling. She was gripping the porch railing and staring fixedly at an empty SUV in the parking lot, maybe 20 feet away, and said, in tears, that her family was in the car and that they were all leaving the country without her. “Don’t let them go! I don’t want them to go! They’re all leaving without me! Wait! Wait!” she was calling in hysterics. We both told her the car was empty and she looked at us incredulously. “But I just saw the woman there light a cigarette out the window!” We asked if we could call her son for her and she said she’d tried that all morning and the number had been disconnected because they were all leaving the country.
“Where are we? What is this place we live in?” she said in a panic. “What is this type of place called?”
“An apartment complex.”
“Does this place have a special name?”
We told her the name of the complex.
“Oh. Oh. OK.”
She heard the phone ringing inside and panicked. “I need to get that! Help me get inside!” She was so upset she couldn’t walk–she could only shuffle in tiny baby steps, gripping the porch railing. I’ve seen her walking more or less normally before, so it’s not a permanent condition. I tried to help her into her house to get the phone, but it stopped ringing before she got into the door. “I’m so scared,” she said. “I’m so scared,” and she started crying again. “Don’t let them leave!”
Eventually, we tag-teamed her back into the house by telling her one person would stand outside and make sure the car wouldn’t leave without her. She couldn’t remember her son’s number, but fortunately I found it taped to the fridge and we called him. He said, “Thanks for calling, I’ll call her right now” and called her on her house phone, and presumably talked her down.
“Is everything OK now? He told you everything was fine and nobody was leaving?” we asked.
“Yes, thank you, thank you,” she said to us. “Please don’t tell my son I made such a fool of myself.”
We went inside our house and called Adult Protective Services. They weren’t there, so I left a message.
I feel kind of guilty about this, because we haven’t talked to her son at all, and I feel like we should try to work things out with him before calling APS. But I’m not sure what I would gain by talking to her son–nor do I have any experience with what would be an acceptable solution to her living situation. So if he said “oh, it’s fine, we visit her every two days” I wouldn’t know if that was enough, or too little, and I wouldn’t want to be in charge of enforcing it. She just really doesn’t seem like she’s in any state to be living alone. I don’t want to go out there and find her dead body on the porch because she’s gotten hypothermia from standing out there in the middle of a Midwestern winter, trying to keep an empty car from leaving the parking lot, and I don’t want her to get confused inside her house and burn down our whole apartment building.
Does anyone have experience with this type of situation? Should I try to somehow work things out with her son before talking to APS? (They haven’t called back yet) Or should I figure that the situation is what it is, we’ve observed what it is for months, and if nothing is wrong then APS will just drop the case?
(Also, a way more minor issue–when we went inside to get her son’s phone number, we also noticed our doormat inside her house (it had gone missing months before) and I am wondering if she may have taken a UPS package of mine that went missing last month. Our neighbor on the other side had a package go missing too. Can/should I try to find out if she has them?)