That’s one of my mother’s things as well. She wants to know when we are going home, when she’s in the house she’s lived in for 89 years. The last time I was there she wanted to know when the boat was coming to pick us up to go home (She’s never had anything to do with boats, and our house isn’t near the shore.) She told me to call my cousin, who lives upstate, to tell her we would be coming by in the boat to pick her up in the morning. Then she wanted me to take down the curtains so we would have them when we got home. When I told her we already had curtains exactly like that at home so we didn’t have to take them, she started to get mad.
My mother’s biggest complaint is that she’s bored. Watching TV can’t be very interesting if you can’t remember what happened five minutes ago. Nature documentaries seem to be the best since there’s no plot to follow. We used to have her do jigsaw puzzles since you don’t have to remember anything but now she seems to have lost interest in that.
DGH, I’m really sorry. My mother had Alzheimers but she got sweeter rather than angrier.
It doesn’t sound like the store trips are doing either of you any good. Don’t feel guilty if you just can’t do it anymore. And be very, very kind to yourself.
What you describe sounds horrendous, and you have my sympathy.
My thought is that you need to figure out a way to deal w/ your guilt, rather than your mother’s symptoms. As has been said, hard to see the “outings” as doing you or her any good - plus, they must be unpleasant for any store staff, other shoppers…
My opinion is that the person you loved is gone. I’d favor limiting the time you spend with the person she currently is, because doing otherwise will only cause you to forget who she was, and solidify your memories of her as she is today.
Sorry - this sucks. I sure hope to never be in a similar position towards my loved ones.
My mom is in the rage period along with trying to escape the house. She is living with my older sister in Florida. Assisted living isnt affordable us so my sister is it. Wish I could help but I’m in Michigan and unable to go there. I think most of us know/feel your pain. My cousin went thru this. The people with Alzheimer’s are no longer who they were.
A friend of mine told me it helped when he was frustrated with his dad to just laugh at the situation. Sometimes the non-sequitur laughter seemed to “break through” to his dad, also.
Toward the end his dad couldn’t/wouldn’t walk. My friend would get a call from his mom (who lived 5 minutes away) asking if he could come help get his dad into bed. He would stand him up and literally pick him up and move him a few steps. He would strap him into the chair-stair lift and eventually get him into bed. It was exhausting.
Once he used the bathroom after getting him into bed, then on the way out of the house found him sitting in the living-room again, with the stair-chair still upstairs!
When she needs to go into a nursing home (not the same as assisted living, but you probably already know that), Medicaid will pick up the tab. If she makes too much money to qualify for Medicaid, Florida has some arrangement where you can give the extra income to a trust of some sort. (A few years ago, I could’ve quoted chapter and verse to you on this, but now I’d have to ask my wife later on; it’s her grandmother that was in that situation.)
The wife of a friend had to put his wife into a nursing home. But that is not perfect either. First there was a man who kept hitting on her (I have to say that she is damned attractive for an 80 year old), but now his dementia has progressed to the point that this has stopped. But recently another new patient arrived and he came up to her when my friend was visiting and grabbed her tightly and kept saying, “She’s mine, she’s mine” and wouldn’t let go. The nursing staff refused to intervene saying they were not permitted to use force on him. Likewise security. Finally, my friend called the cops who came and forcibly removed him from her. She stays in her room unless my friend is visiting and then they just keep her away from, although he tries to grab her. So even a nursing home is not perfect.
Mostly she remembers her husband, but not always. And when she does remember him, she is always asking him to take her home. And keeps asking why she is confined. It is a really sad situation and there are no solutions.
This is actually how my brother and I coped when we lived with our great-grandmother because our grandfather, who was dying of cancer at the time, begged our parents to keep her out of a nursing. We were really young at the time, though; I was 17 to 18 and he was just 11 to 12. To protect our good memories of our great-grandmother we started to see the her-who-had-Alzheimer’s as a different person altogether. Great-grammy would never break a plate over our mother’s head, no, that was her. She would make things as difficult as possible, kick and pull hair and say horrible and hateful things, not our Grammy. And it was safe - outside her presence - to be frustrated and mad at how she acted, because the person we loved faded away, leaving only someone bitter, confused, and furious behind. Honestly, by the last few months, our grammy was already 99% gone. There was nothing left of the person she’d been, except for the occasional lucid moment every several weeks when for a short time she’d feel guilty and cry over her behavior even though it wasn’t really under her control.
I wish I could tell you how to make it better, but there really isn’t a way. Even if you put her in a home, it’s still terribly sad because it’s a such vicious disease, stealing not only your memory and what makes you yourself, but also driving other people away in ways that other physical illnesses tend not to (severe untreated mental illness, otoh…)
See, my dad would be totally supportive of the tricks and lies I have to resort to these days. My dad is mostly gone. Mostly, I’ve got four year old Bobby who remembers his Marine training. So far, I’m the only person he gets violent with. And then the fog lifts for a minute and he sees its me and we both cry a little. And then he’s telling me again about the burglars who smashed his teeth. God help me, I hope he dies soon. This is not good for my mother.
Threads like this are so sad. Makes me glad my parents died relatively young, but in full control of their faculties. I wonder how many of these elderly, if asked when they still retained their faculties, would wish to exist in this manner?
Do you even know she wants this “respite from boredom and isolation”? One memory I have of my parents after the dementia ( not from Alzheimer’s) started to get bad is my mother telling my father " You’re having fun, you just don’t know it yet" on a family vacation that my father did.not.want.to.go.on.
She kept him at home with the help of aids, but that meant she wouldn’t go on vacation without taking him, because he’d find a way to “punish” her for it. But he also didn’t want to leave the house, so he’d “punish” her for taking him, too. She couldn’t win, but your mother may not even see the trips to the dollar store or lunch as an enjoyable respite. She might actually prefer to be in her room.
My recently deceased mom didn’t turn as bad as some of the examples given here. Nevertheless, she spent the last years of her life in depression, anxiety, worrying about all sorts of stuff, convinced that people around her were plotting against her, feeling persecuted, more and more unable to do or understand anything but refusing to admit this inability. She was miserable all the time during her last years. On top of it, during these last years she buried two of her children, my brothers, who died prematurely (although it’s pretty obvious she didn’t care much about the death of the second one, due to the deterioration of her mental state).
During these years, I couldn’t help but think that my father had been lucky to die when he was still in good shape both physically and mentally. He was rather happy with his life until the end, as was my mother until her mind began to deteriorate.
My ex FIL, who has almost exactly the same age as my mother, has been going through a very similar deterioration of his faculties pretty much at the same time. However, presumably due to his very different and easy-going original personality (while my mother was a very rigid person, convinced that nobody but her could ever be right about anything), that seems to survive in a way, he’s quite happy nevertheless. He will let himself be convinced quite easily that he imagined whatever event perturbed him, and let people handle things he cannot anymore. Even though he sometimes has bouts of paranoia he has never shown aggressiveness. He’s more and more divorced from reality, but the greatest problem his children face is preventing him from leaving his place to return “home” since he’s in a much better shape physically than mentally (it’s surprising how many people with deteriorating faculties are convinced that their house isn’t theirs, and want to go back “home”. I assume they don’t feel their environment “familiar” anymore).
I’m told by my cousins that my aunt, who also suffers from Alzheimer, seems also rather happy despite her deteriorated state. She used to think that her (deceased) husband was at their country house, and expected to go there soon but was fine with her current accommodation (on the other hand, my uncle wasn’t a good man, to the extent that I suspect she would be happier without him around). Now her state has deteriorated too much to even follow this kind of reasoning, but they tell me that, like my ex-FIL, she has never been violent or agressive, nor tends to feel terrified or in anguish for long.
My mother wanted to go home. It took weeks, after continually responding 'you are home, Mom", to figure out it was her childhood home she wanted to go to and I suspect this is true of most dementia sufferers since their brains seem to lose their memories in reverse order and they seem to regress into childhood or infancy.
My mom was in hospice (she stopped eating or drinking for a period of time and that qualified her)during the time she had dementia and they gave her anti-anxiety meds in liquid form that we would rub on her wrists. We told her it was lotion but most of the time she was still suspicious.
My advice, stop taking her out. Does she even remember it after the fact? Visit her in the care facility where you can walk out of the room if she attacks you. She isnt your mother anymore but you are still you and this kind of trauma will stick with you. Do what’s best for you.
I doubt that you did this with malicious intent, but inserting a random joke into a thread on such a serious topic is very inappropriate and comes off as a bit jerkish. Please do not do this again.
Nursing homes, as a rule, are far from perfect. They may just be the least worst option after a certain point, if caring for a family member with advanced dementia is more than one can handle.
I’m not convinced that making a joke in a serious thread is jerkish. I suspect it’s more likely to make people smile than to offend them since it isn’t mocking anybody involved.
No, she’s desperate to not be there. She close to cries when I take her back. And esp. these last couple of times when she’s acted up, and I don’t want to be around her any longer. She starts in with, “don’t take me back, I’ll buy you things, I’ll buy you things.” But we’re not 6 any more so that doesn’t have any appeal.
But I am re-thinking taking her out after she screamed at a clerk in a store who simply moved a cart out Mom’s way and I had to try to calm everyone down.
For now, I am visiting less frequently, with hope that I will be more happy to see her and be able to stay calm.
I think threads like this should spur those of us in the caretaking generation to plan ahead for our dotage. My parents died relatively young. My MIL never turned mean like the OP describes, but spent her last several years awfully incompetent. Personally, I have no desire to ever exist like that, or to have MY kids think of me and have to care for me the way my MIL’s kids did.
What kind of plan? My mother always told me to let her know if she began to lose her marbles. But of course, when she did, she was unable to realize it, and didn’t believe a word of what I was saying. If I go the same way, presumably, I won’t be able to realize it, either. Once retired, I won’t have the money to plan for any kind of high end nursing home, and not having children, there will be nobody with any standing to look after my well being. Presumably, if it happens, I’ll rot in some random nursing home, in despair and anguish, until my death. The only way I see to avoid that would be to commit suicide while I’m still in perfect shape, but why would I do such a thing?
Some people are diagnosed early enough to be able to understand what is coming. We used to have a poster like that (unfortunately suffering from a very early instance of Alzheimer, since he was I think in his early 50s). For a while he kept posting, and even maintained a website about his disease. Didn’t last very long, though. His posts soon became incoherent and eventually he disappeared. Maybe in such a situation, one could still have enough time and mental faculties to do something, but it’s unlikely.
She’s never had anything to do with boats, and our house isn’t near the shore.) She told me to call my cousin, who lives upstate, to tell her we would be coming by in the boat to pick her up in the morning. Then she wanted me to take down the curtains so we would have them when we got home. When I told her we already had curtains exactly like that at home so we didn’t have to take them, she started to get mad.