Mom and I were in the kitchen and I was preparing a drink and some appetizers for us to take out to the backyard deck. I had just poured Mom a rum and coke when she took the remaining coke from the can, poured it into a cat dish and set it down for the cats to drink. I said “Mom you realize that cats don’t drink coke right?” Her angry retort was “Well mine do, I always feed it to them.” With that said she walked out to the deck to enjoy her drink. I picked up the bowl of coke from the floor, disposed of it and joined Mom at the backyard table.

Once we settled in, I decided to ask Mom if she thought she had a memory problem. She said yes sometimes. I then asked her if I point out a task she is doing incorrectly and she is confrontational about, does she think she reacts that way because she is embarrassed or because she doesn’t believe that the task she is performing is incorrect. Mom said the later.  I answered I thought that was fair and asked if that bothered her that she doesn’t remember how to do things as she once did. She replied no, because she doesn’t remember that she doesn’t remember so who cares!

I laughed and then she looked at me and said “My life is so different since Pat died. I don’t really know what it should look like anymore so I just have to be OK with how it is.” I was a bit astounded that she was able to attribute her change in cognition to the fact that my Dad died and that was why she believed things weren’t as they always had been.

I guess when you have limited ability to reason, you are going to grab on to the low hanging fruit. For Mom, Dads passing is why her life looks different. She is unable to understand she has dementia, so Dads absence is to her an explanation to a life that now looks jumbled. I guess that reason is as good as any.

They say the person with dementia has it easier in some ways than their loved ones, because they don’t know any different. I am not so sure that is true…. Sometimes this journey is a sad one, all the way around.