Life seldom unfolds according to “plan”. Certainly no one
plans to lose their mind…
My wife’s mother is aged and infirmed. She has many issues;
mobility, self care, instability. But she has, for the most part, retained her
mental sharpness. The nursing home system is extremely complex and she has
progressed from hospital care to skilled care to nursing home care. To the
extent possible, the family engaged in the process, but did not foresee the
turn of events which resulted in her placement in an Alzheimer unit.
She does not belong in this unit and the family is working
frantically to facilitate her transfer to a more suitable facility. In the
meantime, she is confined in a lock-down dementia unit. Her attitude is so
positive and her faith is strong. She said, “Perhaps I have been placed here to
pray for these poor people…” Prayers notwithstanding, it has been an eye opener
for us.
To enter the Alzheimer wing, access codes are punched onto a
security keypad unlocking the heavy wooden doors. Often there are patients
standing inside the door peering out through the two small windows… trying to
find a way out. Some, who appear otherwise healthy, will insist they are staff
or visitors in an attempt to make their way through those doors, back into the
world. All 50 patients behind those doors are severely impacted by mental
disease… except my mother-in-law.
Men and women dressed in casual clothes, tee shirts,
sneakers and sweat suits, roam up and down the long hallways along the highly
polished floors. Some hold dolls or stuffed animals. Some talk to themselves.
Others, like loveable little Lizzy, always seem to have a roll or a handful of
bread and munch as she randomly ping pongs from wall to wall along the bright
corridor. Lizzy is small and painfully thin with short gray hair, her age
somewhere between perhaps 70 and 80. She was the first person I met coming
through the locked door.
Lizzy shuffled up beside me. Her speech is unintelligible,
stuttered. But she spoke passionately, with a tight smile on her face and an
urgent expectation in her eyes. “Aba aba chh chh buh…” she said between
clenched teeth. She took my hand and I followed as we wandered aimlessly and
silently down the hall to the activity room, There, several dozen people sat at
tables or randomly wandered about the room. They took no notice of me and I
stood still to take in the scene.
Some people were sitting silently within themselves,
rocking, seemingly not focusing on anything or anyone. Others were animated,
jabbering away about snippets of thoughts that ran through their ravaged minds.
“I need to go home.”… “Has my meal been paid for?”...“Get them away from me.
Leave me alone!”... “My mother is coming for me today”… Others were speaking nonsense, words without
meaning, without ceasing. Lizzy released my hand and wandered away.
I walked among them and most seemed not to see me, but few
responding to my smile or words of greeting. So foreign. So disturbing. A
thought… how might they react to my gentle, little white dogs? Previously, we
had brought them into hospitals and nursing homes with good results. I asked
permission from the head nurse and with their vet records got the OK to bring
them in from the van. I was apprehensive that some of the residents might be
afraid of them or that others might hurt the dogs so decided to carry them in
order to control their introduction. I was not prepared for the response.
We (Sampson and Lulu, 2 eight pound Maltese and me) rounded
the corner from the long hallway into the activity room. Many people broke into
broad smiles. Eyes, which had been
expressionless, were alive. Hands were outstretched.
I quickly learned to approach cautiously before bringing the
dogs close enough to be petted. Ken, a baseball capped, 84 year old former
logger, toothless and confined to his wheelchair, howled at me, “GET THOSE SONS
OF WHORES AWAY FROM ME…”
Minutes later, he gently scratched their ears and reminisced
about how his old hound dog would ride with him on his skidder as he worked
deep in the Maine woods.
But most of patients, some of whom had appeared catatonic
moments earlier, smiled, stroked their fur, spoke to them softly and with love.
One woman repeated over and over, ‘Look at those beautiful babies… look at
those beautiful babies”. Another woman jabbered away excitedly about pie and
walked over to me presumably to pet the dogs, The nurses broke into gales of
laughter when instead she put her hands inside my shirt and began to pet me.
I moved from table to table, offering each person an
opportunity to pet the dogs or, in some cases, to hold them. They were gentle,
loving. There were those who were unable to respond in any way. Others who
responded with fear. For those who could respond, it was an extraordinary
glimpse of the person they had once been, if only for a moment.
The next weekend when we again visited, there was Lizzy
walking the halls. She gave no indication that she in any way remembered our
walk down the hall together, an event burned into my memory. Her expression
this day was anxious, upset. She seemed about to cry. But later in the day she
approached me in the hall, jabbered excitedly, reached up and gently stroked my
face. “ Moh moh shibbabababa…” she said and laughed. Her eyes and her attention
wandered and she shuffled away. Did she remember me?
How insidious this disease. Late one night, after everyone
was in bed, I walked the halls and read the “shadow boxes’ secured on the walls
at the entryway to each room. Locked wooden boxes with plexi-glass covers.
Names printed on tags, pictures of smiling people now silent, of grandchildren
and children, husbands and wives, of lives now gone forever, the owners but
shadows of their former selves. It touched me deeply.
The following week we arrived on Friday and accompanied my
mother-in -law to dinner. I arrived ten minutes after my wife and her mother
were seated at a table with 3 other women to find one of the women verbally
terrorizing the table. My wife looked at me anxiously. The woman’s name was
Martha.
“God damn you. Don’t look at me like that. You sons of
bitches. Talk, talk, talk. That’s all you do. Just shut up! Shut up!” She
glared at everyone and especially me, the only man at the table. I attempted to
speak with her and she cut me off.”Talk, talk, talk” she taunted and began to
knock food onto the floor and put silverware into her glass of milk. We ignored
her misbehavior and soon she sat, sullen and withdrawn.
After dinner, while my wife was helping her mother prepare
for bed, I wandered down to the community room and found Martha sitting with
another resident. She was cruelly berating him as he sat happily, pulling on
his suspenders. He, in response, was laughing foolishly, smiling broadly and
making train noises. I decided to join the conversation.
Pulling another rocking chair close to them, I asked if I
might sit there and getting no response, began to quietly rock away, not making
eye contact. Soon she began to rant. ‘HE wants it HIS way… always HIS way. HE
thinks because he works he can have it that way… and I suppose he can... Peculiar…
I call it Peculiar.” I began repeating her words back to her. “Yes, he wants it
that way.”… “I suppose he can.”… “Yes. Peculiar.”…
“Choo-Chooo” said Suspenders, complete with arm pull. I
replied “Choo-Choo”. He grinned. She rocked and ranted. “I like these rocking
chairs” I said to no one.
We rocked for 30 minutes. Several times Martha got up from
the chair and each time that she did, I stood in the presence of a lady as my
mother had always taught me to do. And when she sat, so did I. And we rocked some
more.
Finally she rose and walked stiffly down the hall, farting
loudly, muttering. I resumed the conversation with Suspenders. He railed about
“working and working and I told them they can’t do that. That’s not right…. not
right.” as his face clouded up at some distant grievance yet traversing the
wrecked synapses of his brain.
When Martha reentered the room, I stood and she walked
directly to me, but avoided my gaze.
“ It needs to stay here. Right here.” she instructed as she
handed me her blue knit sweater. I hung it on the back of her rocking chair and
smoothed it down gently. “It will be right here for you”, I said.
She continued to mumble about her room and how she wanted to
“just get back”. “Can I walk with you to find your room?” I asked. Remarkably,
she took my arm.
“Good night” I said to Suspenders. “Woo-Wooo”, he replied
Martha rambled as we walked until we met Lizzy who decided
she was going to hold my other arm. Martha raised her voice and cussed her
away. As we walked by the activity room, the big, friendly nurse smiled and
said, “You found a friend Martha?” She gripped my arm tighter.
At the far end of the hall, I spied her shadowbox. Pictures
from before, when she was whole. She was not smiling in any of the pictures.
Hard, stern expressions. Life had not been easy for her.
She seemed relieved when she recognized her surroundings and
announced, “My room… see, my rocking chair… and my bed.” She released my arm
and sat on the side of the bed. And then she looked up and locked eyes with me,
her eyes softened, looked wounded. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as
she spoke directly to me. “This… has been wonderful. I can’t tell you how much
I have enjoyed it. Just wonderful….” She lay back on the bed and closed her
eyes.
Her moment of lucidity hammered my world view. How
remarkable that she was able to surge through her disease, if but for an
instant, to connect with compassion and warmth, to overcome the raging fear and
anger within her crippled mind. An aberration I wondered?
I walked down the now dark and quiet hallways, past the
shadow boxes and the shadow people, lost from the world, mindless, just
waiting. I felt a mixture of emotions, an odd sense of awe and a profound
sorrow. Lizzy wandered down the hall toward me, solitary, mouse-like, munching
on a biscuit and leaving a trail of crumbs behind her as if to mark her trail
back to sanity.
I felt badly that she had been driven away earlier by
Martha’s bitterness and so I smiled and reached to hold her withered hands in
mine. She smiled vacantly, food dribbling out the corners of her lips as she
chewed with open mouth. I whispered in her ear, “Lizzy, you are my favorite,”
She whispered
back…“Thank you…” and drifted into the shadows.
