Dementia Diary: Mom's Great Escape

Mom laughs when I tell her how she eluded staff, security locks, and alarms to get into the closed "Evergreen" area and out into the garden undetected.  She laughs even more when I tell her that, the very next day, she somehow got out again, this time to take another resident across the street to see Mom's old Cincinnati home.  We're in Marietta, Georgia.  

[Photo: (top) The bank and driveway across the street from Mom's facility remind mother of (bottom) the library near her alma mater Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati.]

But, for the staff, Mom's "elopement" was no laughing matter.  Their solution was to put Mom in Memory Care, just what my brother and I wanted to avoid.  "When you go there," I explained to Mom, "you'll be beyond caring.  I'll come to water you twice a day."  That got another laugh from Mom.  We didn't expect Memory Care for a few years, yet. Nothing gets her hackles up faster than any hint that she's being "treated like a child."

The facility proposed a compromise.  She sleeps in her spacious apartment upstairs with all her beloved furnishings and closets of clothes; staff wakes her and takes her to the Memory Care unit for morning activities and lunch, until her Visiting Angel can assume responsibility for her.  At bed time, in her pajamas, she's not a flight risk anymore: she'd no more go out of her apartment undressed and unaccessorized than the Queen would.

After four days of her visiting Memory Care most of each day, I've heard from staff and Visiting Angel:  Instead of raging against locked doors and denying that she belongs in there with all those "old people," she is thriving on attention from staff.  Wherever she wanders in this extensive maximum-security wing, she meets staff members who know her, and she meets people like her.  During group activities, I'm told that her instinct as teacher of 3rd grade kicks in, and she encourages those less sentient than she.  [Photo: Mom enjoyed a visit by "Sammy Davis Jr." to the Memory Care wing Tuesday night.]

Also, during this week, there've been no phone messages from her about being lost, lonely, or angry. And, when I arrived around 8:15 yesterday morning, she was up and showering, in a great mood.

I've asked the management to show her a studio apartment that could become her home base in Memory Care.  The move must be her idea; dementia is quick to suspect that her sons are "putting her away."

[Photo: we visited the doctor Thursday, laughing about every problem.  "I have difficulty walking?  Oh, I guess I do.  I cut the compression stockings off with scissors?  Ha ha!"]


See other entries in my "Dementia Diary."