For almost two months my mom has perseverated on the absence of her gold necklace. My mom hides her valuables and then forgets where she puts them. She jokes about it and acknowledges she needs to stop doing this, but she cannot help herself.
Almost 30 years ago, my mom bought a 2 foot long 22k gold chain. It’s beautiful. Around Thanksgiving she mentioned it was lost. We looked all over their apartment at the retirement community and then made more than 3 trips to the town house to specifically look for the gold chain. When my sister visited, she had helped my mom search in both places.
Right before the Christmas holidays, I introduced them to the graduate student who has been helping me shuttle my children as well as help me with my business. My parents adored her and allowed her to drive them to the town house. That only lasted two days before they rejected the idea of “outside” help.
After the holidays, my mom would call daily asking me to take her to the town house to look for the gold chain. She had no recollection of visiting to look for it any of the numbered visits. I started to leave notes on doors after we had looked through a room but she would angrily tear them off and begin the hunt anew.
I am sympathetic to my mom’s angst, but she was wearing me out. On many of the trips, my mom would share her own frustration in having two places. She lost her wallet, purse, calendar and now her gold chain, and having two places to look was exasperating.
We are approaching the one-year anniversary when the psychologist recommended they move into the retirement community full-time. How much easier their life would if they had accepted that recommendation. Exhausted.
I empathize. Invariably they find it–under the bed, in their bag, in the safe that the forgot the combination to. I try to impress the importance of not living thinking that people are stealing from you; it’s not healthy. We’ve gotten to the point where I don’t even get the call now; three weeks later mom will say “I thought I lost my watch, but I heard your voice and waited.” Vindicated.
Thanks for the note! My dad agree’s that it’s just “stuff” but to my mom it seems to represent so much more. She doesn’t think people have stolen it, she is just on a never-ending search. So far, we have eventually found all those “lost” items.
My Mom is rummaging for something all the time. It seems my blog constantly is headed “Where are those darn hearing aides”, but the other day it was hairspray. I found out through The Dementia Queen blog that “rummaging” is a characteristic of vascular dementia, so it gave me comfort to know that mother isn’t weird or different, but acting exactly what someone with her disease does. When you say your mother has a brain injury, I can’t relate to that as much as to say brain disease, or a shrinking brain, because that is what is happening. Just as your dad has shrunk in height, as my mom who use to be exactly my 5’4″ height but now I look down on her, her brain is also shrinking, and she will lose 2/3 of it by the time this horrible disease is over. Not only shrinking, but getting holes in it too. I can’t even imagine what they are feeling. Mother at first would hold her forehead and claw at it as iff there was something she was trying to dig out, then came headaches and dizzy spells. I’ve learned that if we can get the oxygen on her when the headaches, or dizzy spells, or crying jags come on her, within 10 to 15 minutes they will disappear. Oxygen therapy is really a new way of treating this, so if this starts with your parents, check into oxygen. Mom sleeps with hers on everynight because she was having hallucinations of her bed being on fire or ants all over her bed. With oxygen never another hallucination. Just a thought.
Thank you. I am readied for the next ten hurdles to come! Okay, not really, but I know they are looming on my horizon. Great advice and insight.
Best, Kay