NOTES about what to write, NOT A BLOG PAGE
Her older brother had memory issues as well.
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putting dirty clothes back in the closet, wearing dirty clothes
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Mom was embarrassed about not remembering. Didn’t want to talk about it. Didn’t want anyone to notice.
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Besides mom always liked to hear herself talk, was right even if she wasn’t, and for my whole life had repeated herself.
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Dinners at Rick’s house
1) Christmas 2013 while dad was in the hospital. Mom wanted to go home NOW, she took Cappy and was going to walk home
2)Shucking corn – We had mom shuck corn one time and when she was finished I was reaching down beneath her seat to pick up the shucks and hairs that missed the trash can and she said, “Wow who ever shucked the corn sure wasn’t a very good shot.”
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Transitioning mom from one facility to another – she stayed at Rick’s house for a couple days. He works from home. She kept interrupting him, he called his friend Susie over to entertain mom.
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Grand Villa
2014 had to trick mom to move her in
Grand Villa – “Memory Care”
Eastbrook – Memory Care
Lake Mary Health and Rehab
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From Larry Wechsler…
“After my father died, my mother lived for 8 years in their same single-family house. It was in a small development with a community pool and an HOA, about a half mile from us. The community was not just seniors, there were young family’s there too. I own a couple of Mustangs and she had a two-car garage so one of my Mustangs was typically at her house and I would walk over whenever I wanted to use it. She knew all of her neighbors and I managed to get to know some of them too. Whenever my wife and I went out of town for more than a few days I would let the neighbors know and they would watch out for her.
My mother owned a 7-year-old Toyota Camry with only 8,000 miles on it. Parked in her garage since new, the car was pristine. She had always been a very independent person, a book keeper by profession she was extremely organized, good with numbers and able to make her own life and financial decisions without any assistance or input from us. She didn’t use the car much but it represented her independence. A couple of years before she died, I began to notice a decline in her memory and mental acuity. The internet is a powerful tool and I began to visit web sites like WebMD and others to learn about dementia, what the signs were, how it differs from just forgetfulness, and what was likely to come next. She continued to live her life, make her own decisions and use her car to come and go as she pleased. At 90, I knew the day would soon come when she should no longer drive and I was dreading it. That light bulb went on in my head one day when I was stopped for a red light, the left turn arrow turned green and I stepped on the gas and went straight through the red light. Nobody was coming, I didn’t get a ticket, but I knew what I had done and realized that the odds that my mother could do something like that were significantly higher than for me.
One day, entering her garage with the keypad, I noticed a bruise on the front bumper of her car. I didn’t mention it to her and didn’t think too much about it. It could happen to anyone. A few weeks later I noticed that the rear bumper had been painted a slightly different shade of silver, and the bruise on the front bumper had been fixed and it also was a slightly different shade of silver. I asked my mother about it and learned that she had backed into a parked car in a Publix parking lot and two young men approached her and told her they could fix her car for $ 200. She allowed them to come to her house, which horrified me. They were, thank goodness, not criminals, just lousy at body work. Looking back on it now, my mother probably knew she shouldn’t be driving and didn’t want to tell me about her fender benders for fear I might make her stop. She also knew it was dangerous to allow two strangers into her garage but the fear of losing her independence was greater than the risk of robbery or assault.
My mom had always been a good driver and had never had an accident that was her fault. But the parking lot misadventures happened a couple more times, once when she left the parking lot, then tried to go back with one of my sons to leave a note on the car she hit but couldn’t even remember where she had parked let alone which car she hit.
One day when I entered through the garage, I noticed that there was a really large dent in the rear quarter panel on the passenger side of her car. This time I went in to talk to her about it. She had no idea the dent was even there. I found a note under the windshield wiper that a witness had left stating that another car had backed in to hers. I called the lady and sure enough, she had witnessed the accident and took down the license plate number. The damage was sufficient that we had to file an insurance claim so we went to the police station. I hadn’t ridden in a car with my mother driving in decades but this time, I had her drive and I rode in the passenger seat. She drove perfectly. She kept up with traffic and drove as normally as I would have. At the police station she told the officer that she was in a different parking lot from where the witness had said. She couldn’t remember what day the accident happened (the day before), or any of the circumstances, including that there had been a witness. That was the last day she ever drove, ironically, because of an accident that happened when she wasn’t even in the car!
She didn’t want to stop driving. I told her that I had no problem with her driving, so long as she took a written driving test. Her physical ability to operate a motor vehicle was not in question. Her mental capacity to know where she was and make the decisions necessary to drive definitely was. She refused to take the test, preferring to just give up driving. I agonize over this ultimatum to this day. It wasn’t my objective to embarrass my mother. But she knew that she would not be able to pass the test. I told her the truth, that at 91, she had lived her life. But if she were to injure or kill a young person in a traffic accident, that would be a tragedy. And if I could have prevented it, I would live with that the rest of my life. It was better that she stops driving 6 months early than keep driving a day too late!
She agreed not to drive the car, but the car stayed in her garage for another three months till my oldest son could fly down and drive it back to Atlanta where he lives. I never physically took the keys away. I don’t believe she ever drove it because I never saw any parking lot dents on any of the bumpers, nor any bad body work. She promised me she wasn’t going to drive, and I don’t think she did.
I can’t be sure, and perhaps there is no relation but I believe her loss of independence hastened her mental decline.
My mother lived with breast cancer for 30 years. It was under control for much of that time with drugs and at 91, her kidneys only functioned at 15%. My sister took her to the grocery store on Saturdays but as her dementia progressed it became difficult. Grocery shopping became an entire morning event because as organized as she once was, she could no longer make a shopping list and didn’t know what she had in the house and what she needed. If toilet paper was on sale, deciding if the sale product was a better deal than another brand, if 9 two ply regular rolls were a better buy than 6 mega rolls could agonize her, not because of the indecision but because she could no longer do the math in her head. I told her that she had lived long enough to buy whatever toilet paper or other product she wanted. She didn’t have to worry about what was on sale. She was unable to throw caution to the wind when it came to toilet paper or anything else. She just didn’t have the mental capacity to live her life the same way as she once had and she knew it. It frustrated her.
Over the next 2 years my mother’s health and memory declined. The drugs she took to keep her cancer at bey stopped working as well as they had. At 92 she made the decision to stop treating her cancer and let nature take its course. Her mental capacity had declined but she was still able to make decisions like this. We hired a live-in aid to help her. The aid stayed with her 6 days a week and went home on Sundays. She had a car and took my mom shopping, to the doctor, and occasionally out to lunch or dinner. She was fantastic and my mother adored her. I saw her every day, usually on my way home from the office. She had dinner with us every Sunday when her aid was off.
My mother died in April, 2018, one month shy of her 94th birthday. She had been in hospice care at her home for about 3 or 4 months. We spent a lot of time together talking about her life, her family, her mother, who had died long before I was born, and what life was like growing up in 1930’s New York City. Thankfully, her dementia never got to the point where she didn’t know who we were, couldn’t talk to us, etc. She could still make a lot of decisions with our input. But her inability to be herself bothered her. In her final years I learned a tremendous amount from my mother. I know if I’m lucky enough to die of old age, what that means, and what to expect”