Memory Care

Towards the end of her life, my mother-in-law had to be placed in a memory care unit. She was lucky that one had just opened in the town she lived just outside of. At the time, these were quite a new concept. Previously such patients had just been warehoused with the rest of the general population of senile and elderly infirm in a standard nursing home. She was far from infirm, however, despite a long-broken collarbone that never quite healed right, and far from senile. There was just very little of her short term memory left.

I saw this as a double tragedy for her. She never wanted to be put into any kind of a facility. She had spent her life as a strong, competent, intelligent, independent woman, proud of her accomplishments, including many years as a teacher in Home economics, math, and finally as the school librarian. She couldn't remember that she finally agreed that this was the best place for her, and by far the safest.

But the second and real tragedy for her was that she could never remember when people visited her. Her son and daughter-in-law, living in the same town, visited her at least daily if not twice daily. Her memory told her that she had been abandoned. Living four hours away, it was much harder for me to visit, though I did manage to drag the whole family down to see her for one nice visit while she was still there. It was a good visit, though I think the kids were upset when she occasionally didn't know who we all were, or mixed up details of people's lives. Confused as she was, she relished having visitors. I don't know how soon she forgot we were there, but we had, after all, made the time and that was what counted.

Her feelings of abandonment led to her starting to call 911 for no reason but loneliness. It did work, as she got flurries of attention after each call. However, after the third one, her phone was removed from her room. This had happened just before our visit, and we heard about it from her son John, whom we visited after seeing her.

Several weeks later, she rapidly succumbed to the flu and died. Down we went again for the funeral. My ex, Paul, actually showed up for the service, surprising many of us since he hadn't bothered to do so for his father's funeral several years before. It was the second time we had seen him since 1981, the first being Steph's wedding. He stuck around to chat a few minutes after the service, but left before the family gathered at his brother's house in town for food and conversation. He claimed he needed to get back to the cities to catch a plane back home, but nobody had seen a car and speculation was that he'd actually arrived by bus and was unwilling to admit his true economic circumstances.

At John and Pam's house the conversation naturally turned to Paul for a while, and what was seen as his strange behavior. His brother had his own story to contribute. He'd had to call my ex to make the notification, and apparently old habits of being hard-to-find die hard. The contact number was his attorney's office, who promptly notified him that Paul was dead. Unfazed, having been through the same thing before, John told the receptionist that that was fine, but have Paul call him so he could tell him their mother had died and give him funeral details, etc.

When Paul returned the call, they chatted for a bit. Paul made a point of mentioning to his brother that he'd had a nice long friendly chat on the phone with their mother just a few days before she died. That would have made it more than a month after her phone had been pulled for making those 911 calls! John actually checked with the staff to find out if any calls had come through to his mother, which would have required her being called up to the front office to take it. None had. So far as anyone knew, he'd not contacted his mother for years. And nobody, nobody, suggested that it was any kind of memory problem on Paul's part that led him to claim that he had.