Tag: love
Caregiving Dementia: A Moving Target
When I don’t know where I’m going, it’s best to start, not at the beginning, but where I am. Except, for someone with dementia or caregiving for a loved one with dementia, where you are is a moving target.
Make the Hard Calls
Dementia steals your memory and your life, the progression slowly peeling away who you were. It is not, however, contagious. Nothing is contagious via the telephone. Uncomfortable making that phone call? Try shuffling through life in her slippers for a while.
What Sticks to the Wall
Q: What do alcoholics and addicts say all the time? / A: Leave me alone, I’m not hurting anyone but myself.
Even after thirty years of twelve steps, I’d been underestimating the impact I had on her life. Then our lives were thrown against a wall of dementia like a handful of spaghetti, and I got to see what stuck.
That Makes Me Sad
There are words that make me sad: Ma looks me in the eye, “You’re really so good to me.” Sometimes followed by an “I love you.” Does she, or are those words part of her survival plan?
Object Impermanence
Object Permanence is the why in why Peek-A-Boo is such a blast, why babies are surprised AF every time you appear again. The other end of the spectrum I call Object Impermanence in adults with dementia. That rock solid knowledge that when something or someone is out of sight or sound, that thing or person is simply…gone for good and for ever.
Quarantine Sunday #20
There is no aide today, only Big E & me. Tomorrow is our anniversary, Ma and me living together for the last two years. Both still alive, older and tireder than when we started. Outside, there’s a raging pandemic & it’s 90-hell-degrees. Inside, we have each other.
Parched & Faded: Lipstick Memories
Big Edie Benjamin Buttons along, forgetting all the every-day things I’d learned from her, the things that make up a life, she tries to re-learn living, from me. What’s lost will never come back. I can’t fix it or slow it down. Instead, I honor our lessons, reminding her who taught me to read a recipe & cook; clean a house properly; put on lipstick and that it’s okay to enjoy sex.
Cohabitating: Me & My Shadow
In a life where nothing is certain, I am an anchor. I’d envisioned lots problems, becoming one half of conjoined twins–attached at the heart–wasn’t one of them. She’s losing/has lost the ability to think of things she’d like to do without prompting. Everything you thinks of as your life up to this moment? Imagine that, but gone.
Mornings, We Talk About Dying
Everyone needs something to live for. My mother lives for the day she will die. The innate right to choose your own time and method of death is a part of who we were as a family, one of the few things all three of us agreed on.
All the Single Mommies
This is about being a caregiver when you never even planned on children. On said child being your 89-year-old mother. About two old ladies & five cats. This is some Grey Gardens 11372 caregiver shit.
A Lesson in Loss: On the Death of a Friend
A friend of mine died this week. The older I get, the more often I’m…
the bridal bouqet
It was a lovely wedding in a neighborhood church that welcomes all possibilities of love….
orphan-age
No matter how old you are when you lose that second parent, you’re an orphan. It’s not the same as when you’re 5 or even 15, but when you’re 50ish it’s lonely.
