Rant #3,111: In the Dark

It is kind of weird how your life often plays out on your brain.

As regular readers of this Blog know, my 92-year-old mother has dementia, but otherwise, she is in quite good shape for someone of her age, thank goodness.

Her hearing is not what it once was, so every few months we have to go to a hearing center for an upgrade and/or cleaning of her hearing aids.

(Getting her to wear them regularly is another story for another time.)

So we went to the hearing center, the technicians did what they needed to do, and my mother said she could hear a bit better than she could before.

We came home, and I said that I would see her later as she rested from the car trip.

As I always do, I went down to her part of the house to see her after I ate dinner, both to see her and to make sure she was eating, and also to give her the pills she takes in the evening with her food.

She was ready to make something for herself, and she went to the bathroom beforehand, and I was sitting on her couch waiting for her to come back and start to eat so I could give her the pills she takes.

While I was waiting, my eyes and my mind centered on the marble-top table we have in the living room, the table that is pock-marked with divots in its wooden legs placed there by me when I was a toddler, whether by falling into it, throwing things at it, or who knows what else.

(I have been told that I was a little terror as a toddler, and those deep divots in those legs were mine, all mine.)

Anyway, for the longest time that I can remember, atop the table sat my bar mitzvah album, which has sat on the top of that table for going on 53 years in May of this year.

So yesterday evening, I just happened to look for it, as I just wanted to thumb through the pages once again to eat up some time until my mother came out of the bathroom, and my eyes searched and searched for it, darting back and forth numerous times, and it wasn’t there.

When my mother came out of the bathroom, I asked her where it was, she didn’t know but searched through a cabinet she has in the living room full of scrapbooks, but I knew it wasn’t in there because it had never been in there.

(My mother said that my bar mitzvah album was never on the table, which demonstrates her dementia fully, since like I said, it had rested atop the table for more than 50 years.)

Anyway, not yet in a panic but getting there, my sister managed to call my mother in the middle of all of this, and I asked her over the phone if perhaps she had the album.

She said she would look, she called me back within five minutes, and lo and behold, she had the album, but said she didn’t know why.

We figured out that since my sister told me she took a whole slew of albums from my mother months ago—probably for safekeeping after my mother’s dementia struck and she was throwing out everything that wasn’t bolted down—that my sister took the album for protection and safekeeping.

I asked her to bring it with her when she comes over to see my mother the next time—probably on Sunday—and everything was pretty much hunky dory from that time on.

I told my wife and son about it, and that was pretty much that … until I went to sleep,

Sometime during my sleep through nearly 3 a.m., I had this recurring dream about not knowing where my classes were in college—a dream that was definitely related to my mother’s current state of mind.

In the dream, for the life of me, I could not remember what rooms my classes were in, no matter how hard I tried.

I decided to go to I think it was the registrar in the dream, but before I got there, the dream would start up again, and this pattern was almost a “Groundhog Day” dream, as the same thing kept happening over and over and over again.

Finally, at about 3 a.m., I woke up from this recurrent nightmare, went to the bathroom, and could not fall asleep again until maybe 4:30 a.m. or so, upon which I had a different dream—nothing with nothing and I barely remember it—and I woke up at about 6 a.m.

Yes, my mother’s dementia is getting to me.

I see her each and every day, and it breaks my heart that this once vibrant, aware person now cannot even figure out what day of the week it is, whether she ate anything, or what my birthday or age is.

And being what amounts to her caretaker, I think it is starting to permeate my very being, even when I am sleeping.

I can only imagine what she is going through, although at her current level of dementia, she probably doesn’t know.

It is truly heartbreaking, but there is little to do about it, except to make her feel comfortable and involved, because her dementia, as we have found out after numerous tests, is entirely age related … and it isn’t going to get any better.

But it is playing on me, and I just have to keep my patience and frustration under wraps.

If I get it all out in a dream, a nightmare that unnerves me, so be it.

I wake up, it was only a dream, and I can move on from it.

My mother … it is like she has a perpetual blanket over her head, one that she can’t get her head out of, no matter how hard she tries.

It really is a shame.