MY MOTHER DOESN'T KNOW ME

The saddest thing for an adult is to feel that the care of a parent is emotionally pointless. Of course, they know the parent must be cared for when dementia has diminished capacity to manage life safely.
“My mother doesn’t even know me,” they’ll say.
“Dad doesn’t even know my name.”
However, it is very clear to me, as a 20-year caregiver of people with dementia that this great divide is not being read accurately by the caregiver or care home visitor. Dementia doesn’t attack the feelings. In fact, many people with dementia come closer to their own feelings than they ever did before their illness. But dementia certainly attacks a person’s ability to communicate clearly.
It also, of course, attacks memory. Short-term can be extremely fragmented. Days, months, years and even decades can be lost to recall. This is what dementia does. Everyone pretty much knows this.
What very few people seem to understand is how this dismantling of memory complicates other issues. Here’s the thing, almost all older people enter life recall at very deep levels. By that I mean, they re-examine, review and possibly revise their life story at great depth. This is a normal and actually very spiritually healthy activity appropriate to old age.
In fact, it is probably healthy and appropriate at any age to try to understand our lives, what made us and what perhaps we need to remake. It is especially significant for elders because of the approach of death. The push for peace, resolution and final understanding of the course of a life is the deep work of age. It is not useless “living in the past.” It is the deep human search to understand life at its most profound level.
Talk to any older person and you’ll find this is a universal concern. Those people sitting around doing nothing? They may be doing something deeper and more spiritually profound than you’ve ever done. So there!
Interestingly, people with dementia do this too. We know this because, if we listened to them — and in my extended experience, most people do NOT listen to those with dementia, even when it may be their own parent — we’d know they’re talking about Mom and Dad, the family home way back and far away, the stuff of upbringing.
But here’s the big complication that dementia brings. Where healthy elders know that they’re simply recalling intense memories of previous times, elders with dementia have no such terms of reference. What they recall, they live, because they do not have the internal calendar of this time and this year with these people.
Effectively, this means that elders with dementia actually reside in former time zones in their own heart, feelings and fractured memory. The really interesting thing about this is their recall is often extremely accurate. They know who lived in that time zone and they get the names right. AND if you are their child now, seventy to ninety years later, they cannot get your name right. How could they? They’re still sixteen.
Therefore, if your mother is living in a different time zone, you need to be listening for the names she does use or the things she’s telling you.
If she calls you Violet — her long dead sister’s name — or jokes about the things you did together, then she is saying, “You’re family, we’re close, I know you.”
And you know what? You need to get over yourself. Because your parent’s dementia is actually NOT all about you. So, listen, think and forgive. You’ll feel much better.
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