Dementia Diary: Closing a Gate

Our school gives us Yom Kippur off.  I'm not Jewish, but this commemoration of the gates closing on Jerusalem's ancient temple has become my favorite holiday, not just because it's a break mid-week. On Yom Kippur, I reflect on gates closing and opening around me.  This year, I thought of the key-coded door at the entry to Memory Care -- where Mom no
w has spent six weeks.

I punch the key pad to get in and out.  More than once, I've had to hurry out before a gentleman who rushes me and bangs on the door when it shuts behind me.  Beyond this door is a warren of small apartments, community rooms, and spacious well-lit hallways.

Mom's one of the few not in a wheelchair and still able to carry on a conversation. But she's settling in. She has a routine, waking around 10, making herself lovely for lunch.  She chats with the staff and with visitors, since most of the residents don't seem to speak much.  A companion stays with her through the afternoon and dinner.  She pours wine from one or two small bottles of watered-down Moscato, and goes to sleep after dark.

For the first few weeks, I was getting angry phone messages.  "Where's my stuff?" "Why did you put me here?" "When am I going home?" But I've not had a call like that in weeks. She seems not to remember having lived anywhere else.

Saturday mornings, I wake her early for breakfast at the French café [see photo]. She laughs out loud when I take her by the hands to pull her up to a sitting position on her bed. (Weight gain, side effect of a drug and of arthritic knees, has made sitting up difficult.)

Everything seems to be a laugh, now.  She laughs most at herself.  When, after a week-long search, her companion Laura found the room key in a flower pot on the shelf, Mom said, "Isn't that where everyone puts their keys?"  When I told her that my car, which she thought new, was the one I've driven for ten years, she quipped, "Well, I haven't seen you in ten years."  She laughs when I show her the grocery list she posted on the mirror:  "Apples, coffee, cigarettes."  She hasn't smoked in 50 years.  "Well, you don't want me to live to 100, do you?" she joked.  Incredulous that we elected this president, she asked, "Who did they run against him?  Hilary? Now, that was dumb."

Her favorite joke, the one that makes her laugh 'til she cries, is just for me to recount her escapades that caused the facility to put her in "maximum security" and to add new exit procedures building-wide. "I escaped four times?" she laughs.

So, that electronic gate makes us both secure.  For the first time in years, I'm not afraid that she's wandering outside, or falling down after over-imbibing, or just alone and lonely.

And we close the gate on dreading the day when she goes into Memory Care.  That day has, incredibly, come and gone without much drama. I expect this move to last, until the day she no longer will take my hands to lift her out of bed.

Related blogposts:
See related articles on my Dementia Diary page.
Here are two posts about earlier Yom Kippur holidays.  A 2015 bike ride among falling leaves reminded me of an overnight flight to visit to my grandmother fifty years earlier, for an essay I called "Memory and Ritual: Solice at the Solstice."  In 2016, I considered many gates closing as I approach 60, "Cycling on Yom Kippur."