Nevertheless Dementia, We Persist

fun activities

Lynne joined me for our visit in a private room. She wore black and gray cotton sweaters, summer red and yellow capri pants and flip flops on bare feet. We had 11 inches of snow outside her window. She said, “There was so much snow. … You couldn’t go.”
I had decided to amicably encourage her by quietly listening to every word, if she was in a good mood. I want to know her thoughts when she spends hours alone, or absorbed in thought around other people, and when staff doesn’t need to call me because she’s anxious.
Quiet smiles amid slurps of our strawberry and vanilla milkshakes.
“They’re going to get someone new. … Not yet.”
She looks at the floor. “We had it all. We have family. We’re together.”
I nodded, “We are.”
She squeezed her hands. “And they’re so good. … We’re so lucky. … We’re so blessed.”
She sat back. “That’s why they say, ‘I’m uppity’…. Because we have it all.”
We opened her 55th birthday album of family photographs. She paged through it, stopping with a laugh and a point. “They were so little. … I loved that shirt.”
She’d follow a thought in silence until she noticed the album and flipped another page. “There she is.”
I read her the poem, I’m From Mom, which she wrote for Karen on Mother’s Day in our fiftieth year of marriage. She laughed, repeating phrases.
After half-an-hour, she leaned forward. “I think I should probably get back. I don ‘t want to overstay. Or they’ll think I’m uppity.”
We showed her poem to the concierge, who read it along with her. “It sounds like Mary Oliver,” he said.
He made a copy for the Activities Director, who promised he’d read it in poetry class the next day.
I slipped out.