Dancing With Dementia
Last year, my sisters and I moved our beloved 94-year-old mother into Memory Care in Colorado, near where we live. After Jim, my stepfather, and her husband of 33 years passed away in Naples, Florida, we knew she could no longer live alone as Jim had been her gatekeeper, guardian angel, and best friend. They were inseparable. They loved to slow dance in the living room late at night to the old tunes of Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Frank Sinatra.
Mom has dementia, but she doesn’t know it. The amazing thing about Mom is that she lives rather contently in her own ‘reality,’ which is an entire world of unreality. Her dementia has bubble-wrapped her in an imaginary world of make-believe. She keeps waiting for Jim to come back from the grocery store. Mom once lived in La Jolla, California and in her mind, she is living there now in a waterfront condo. On a recent January visit to her Memory Care residence, Mom remarked how shocked she was to see snow falling outside her apartment window, obscuring her view of the Pacific Ocean. Of course, I agreed about what a weird fluke of nature this unexpected snowfall was for Southern California.
Mom told her Memory Care nurse that she holds the Olympic record in backstroke, which has yet to be broken. I have never, ever seen my mom in a swimming pool. She also shared with her nurse that she once had tea with the Queen of England at a Buckingham Palace Garden Party and that she wore her pink silk gown, pointing down at her shabby, old, pink bathrobe, when she met the Shah of Iran at his coronation in Tehran. Dementia has sparked an almost Disney sense of make-believe in Mom’s mind.
Mom was once a very vibrant, cultured, formidable woman with a Ph.D. in psychology and worked very hard to build up her private practice, so seeing her so diminished is heartbreaking. She loved to dance and would jive around the kitchen, laughing out loud. Now, the twinkle in her eye is gone. Her inner light is out. With every visit, I soak her up, knowing this very well may be the last time I can hold her thin, frail, aged hands that show a lifetime of lifting others up.
Living with dementia has made me view life very differently, as I think this could very well be me one day, living in a Memory Care residence, and I hope that my children will treat me with grace. With each visit, I see Mom slowly slipping away from our reality and further into her unreality. Jim passed away on my father’s birthdate, and Jim’s first wife passed away on my mother’s birthdate. I wonder what are the chances of such a coincidence. Maybe they were meant to be lifetime dance partners.
On my last visit to see Mom, she thought I was her nurse, and while I knew this day of nonrecognition would eventually come, it was completely heartbreaking. My mother is a shell of her previous self, yet I find myself mourning her while she is still alive. Mom was an extraordinary lady, and I know she will soon be an amazing angel with Jim by her side. Now, her solo dance is merely a slow shuffle across the bedroom, but someday, she’ll be waltzing across the ballroom floor with Jim once again to the tune of ‘Fly Me to the Moon.’