We’re back home after a physically and emotionally difficult week. My mother-in-law is our only remaining parent, and at 88 she is getting increasingly frail. Yet she insists on staying in her home, with her little dog, as long as possible. So we’ve been trying to assess what she needs to make that a reality — made more difficult due to the fact that we live nearly 400 miles apart.
There are, of course, chronic physical ailments, plus dementia that is making living alone a real challenge. Fortunately, she lives in a retirement community that has a wealth of support services. Yet, it’s difficult for everyone. She knows that she is having problems remembering things and that she gets confused easily, but she’s having a hard time accepting her limitations. So, we’re trying to help her make small changes — giving up driving “for now, while your back hurts.” We’re hoping that as we get some of the support services in place, it may be easier for her to accept the progressive losses of independence.
We’ll all get old at some point. For some of us, that comes sooner than later. Once we get to a certain point, we begin to accept that we will probably die of old age rather than from an accident or a catastrophic illness. We all hope that our aging will be relatively easy — that our decline will be quick and that once we reach a certain point, we’ll just slip away one night, failing to see the next dawn. We all fear losing the ability to do the things we love. Some of us fear losing sight or hearing, or that arthritis will make movement difficult. Modern medicine can work wonders, allowing us to live longer lives than previous generations. Sadly, the longer we live, the more likely it is that we will begin to lose our mental capacity. Dementia robs us of our memories, of those qualities that make us fully human.
Dementia is “the long goodbye.” Slowly, the person we were slips away. Initially, the symptoms are mild and fleeting — easy to miss or to discount. And when it becomes obvious, you look back and realize how many of them you missed and over at least months. My mother-in-law, like many who suffer increasing cognitive impairment, found ways both to cope and to keep the rest of her family from worrying. We didn’t realize that her “Oh, hanging in there” response to our asking how she was doing was how she covered her failing memory. At some level we realized that the recitation of the previous week’s activities and meals had stopped, but we didn’t pay much attention because we hadn’t been all that interested in that level of detail. Should we have noticed earlier? Could we have done something? If we’d realized and started medications, could we have slowed the decline? Would that have allowed her body to fail before her mind went? All of those questions are essentially meaningless at this point. We are where we are. So we will do what we can to make whatever time she has left as comfortable as we can — both physically and mentally. And we will enjoy the time we have with her, even at a distance. Four hundred miles is too far to go for a quick visit. We will talk to her regularly, reassuring her of our love and encouraging her, and we will depend on others for details.
