Seconding the movie; and if you go to kids’ movie during the day any chatting she does will blend in w/ the kids talking, running around, etc.
Virtual hugs (( )). What you’re going through is horrible and stressful, and there’s no magical solution to make it better.
I agree that you should stop beating yourself up. If you don’t know how to stop, start a thread asking for advice. That would be interesting.
My suggestion is to find as much humor and amusement in the situation as you can. Some of my ideas may sound mean, but remember that it will all go over Mom’s head, and she won’t remember any of it five minutes later.
When she starts asking the same question(s) over and over, respond by counting.
“Wow, it’s really hot today.” “One, yes it is.”
"Wow, it’s really hot today.” “Two, yes it is.”
Etc.
You’ll get some satisfaction out of knowing how many times she actually says it, and you may wind up rooting for a personal best.
Answer repeated questions with nonsense answers in funny voices.
When my mother would say something particularly offensive, I’d exclaim “Spaghetti!” This at least shut her up for a few seconds and usually knocked her off whatever track she was on.
Make the trips a game to amuse yourself. Day 1: drive to a place(s) that start with “A”. Day 2: “B”. Etc.
There is no easy way. When my father first went to a “home” here in MN, he had come out of a rehab center in Tucson where they did the easy thing and drugged up the ALZ patients with Haldol. It was appalling. Gradually, without Haldol, he came back to himself a bit but he was too far gone to come out of the facility. We first had to deal with the hallucinations the Haldol gave him. That was the easy part. We just agreed or tried to push the conversation along in the direction he was leading it and within a few minutes it was something else. But he lost his ability to find words and speak. But he could still say yes or no. We comforted him with stories he already knew and rolled our eyes about the people at work, which caused him to roll his eyes too. The visits became shorter and shorter as his disease progressed but it was important to be there. Some days I just held his hand. Then, poof, he was gone.
I used a trick that I learned with my grandmother’s aging - she had dementia due to mini-strokes in the memory part of her brain. I told myself, Dad is gone now and this old gentleman resembles him but is not actually him. It made it easier to get through the visits and allowed me to mourn what I had lost more privately, rather than with all the other memory care patients around.
Good luck to you.
Thanks all. I think I know what to try. I’ve been driving her around in OUR neighborhood. So I’ll let her buy me a tank of gas (she’s loaded, but no longer controls her $$) and take her farther out, like a Wendy’s at the far reaches of town or a dollar store 50 miles away. That may help, I dunno. I like ioioio’s suggestion, because I see her today, and it’s hella humid, so I can count on her saying that 1000 times and by god, I’m gonna count.
I actually have an errand with her today that involves her-she need new blouses (WTF do these place do with their clothes) so we’re making a Goodwill stop to find some blouses. Off to google the furthest nearer Goodwill to our neighborhood.
I like the bowling alley idea as well. I amplification of hearing aids make a lot of things difficult, she’ll shriek “Oh no, too loud” and try to run off, but I think we’ll try.
The other thing is that since all her filters are gone, god forbid she see an obese person because she’ll go “Look how fat he/she is!!” Of course I carry the ALZ cards to hand out, but it’s still kind of scary and embarrassing.
It sucks all around and my sympathies to anyone else trying to muddle thru.
Let us know how far you count. 
This. My father loved it.
O.P. said that her mother couldn’t tolerate music due to her hearing aid.
No music would out me in a very bad mood to start with.
Ah, I missed that. My father still loved being driven around.
You have my sympathy, DGH.
I am 51, and have lost both my parents. My father died 20 years ago, and my mother died last summer. I am relatively young to have lost both parents, but even though I feel a little guilty when I admit it to myself, I am glad I escaped having to deal with very elderly parents. I’m missing my mother right now, because I just spent her first birthday without her, and it’s closing in on the first anniversary of her death, but then I hear stories from a coworker who is 10 years older than I am, and has just brought both of her parents to live near her (from out of state), because her mother was diagnosed with brain cancer. Her father was not able to care for her mother, which probably means that he needs care too.
What was your mother like before the Alzheimer’s? Would she want you to feel guilty, or to beat yourself up over being unable to make her happy? if the answer if “No, of course not,” then listen to what your real mother would have wanted for you, and remember that your real mother isn’t here anymore. If the answer is “Yes,” then she wasn’t someone who really cared about your best interests in the first place, and doesn’t deserve you beating yourself up.
That doesn’t mean you should never visit her. Visit her often enough to keep tabs on her welfare. If going to McDanald’s is satisfying her at least a little, keep doing that. When that doesn’t work at all anymore, you may have to keep the visits down to whatever it takes to make sure that she is being cared for, and leave.
The people who have said that is for you, and not for her, because she doesn’t remember it, are right. Listen to them when it gets to the point that you can’t take her out at all.
Thanks to DGH for asking and saying these kinds of things. Thanks also to all who have responded with such kindness and understanding. This is good for me to read; it proves that people are much better than it often seems.
Peace and blessings.
Does she HAVE to have her hearing aids in for a drive in the car?
I’d take my dad for long car drives, and he’d tell me how we were coming up on a little orange grove (in Wisconsin, in the winter). One day he kept telling me about “this little place that makes a great burger” (it was a McDonald’s. Hilarious, considering his formerly-gourmet taste buds).
But we’d leave his hearing aids home (though at first I was taking them along just in case), and I’d just talk really loud in the car.
That wouldn’t work with my mother. With her aids off, she can’t hear you unless she can see your mouth.
This. The 2nd hearing aid is for show, she has no hearing in one ear, and the other is very poor.
Based on someone’s (Colibri?) comment upthread, I have been reading about boredom and ALZ. And poor Mom has a double whammy with her deafness which is so isolating. She refuses to watch TV even with the captions. She lives to “chit chat,” always has, but her deafness isolates her as well, and sometimes, very frankly, she smells bad. She fights showers. So I don’t guess many of the other old ladies want to hang out with her and chat.
Yesterday we had a 4 hr. drive, I ran errands, she didn’t want to get out of the car, but seemed perfectly happy. We had lunch, ran more errands and on the way back to the home, she started up again whining about going back, begging to just drive thru side streets and look at random homes, go to the park, whatever.
So I guess that’s just what I got. I’m going to do every other week rather ran every week visits to save my sanity.
How about combining your drives with some sort of volunteering activity? Perhaps deliver meals for Meals on Wheels or something like that.
Are there fancy/rich/historical parts of your area you can drive through that would keep her attention? I can’t be the only person who likes to see grand homes on a windshield tour.
When dealing with my aunt, the recurring question thing was there. She’d ask every 5 minutes where I was working now. (To be fair, I was a consultant who moved around a lot.) But it showed that she still had an interest in things, and recognized that I changed jobs often.
Oddly enough, she could remember long-ago things very well. We got her talking about building the Trans-Alaska highway and then the DEW line, and she could remember many details. And it was pretty interesting to us. That might be something to try. Ask her about specific things from before you were born: how did she meet Dad, what happened on their first date, where was their first house, etc.
We also found that she liked going on drives. Just driving down country roads was fine, no special destination. Except that after 60+ years as a farm wife, she often wanted to stop so she could get out and check the field crops, or look at their cows. And then she had definite opinions on how well or poorly that farmer was doing. It was best not to drive into the farmyard so she could tell the farmer what he was doing wrong! But she enjoyed telling us all about that, and complaining about young farmers.
The facility had a locked outdoor area, with a small flower garden. When my aunt complained about how poor that garden was (and that it had no vegetables), my Mom told her to ‘just fix it up’ and drove her to the nursery, where they bought seeds, fertilizer, and plants. She spent a great deal of time after that working on ‘her garden’. The facility was happy enough that she enjoyed doing this for hours (and they got a lot of fresh vegetables from it). Except that some other rural women were there, and they started arguing about how things should be done. The facility solved that by giving them each their own area for a garden. By the end of summer, the grassy lawn area had been reduced by about half!