Love in the Time of Alzheimer’s
Mom Gets Violent
Mom’s caregiver Samaria is talking to my sister Claire in the hallway outside my room. “Her dementia is getting worse,” she says in her musical Samoan lilt. “She just tried to hit me. She threw her water at me and called me a bitch. Now I have to change her sheets because they’re all wet.” Samaria speaks matter-of-factly, but Claire and I are horrified. Mom, violent and profane? I go to Mom’s room to help Samaria put dry sheets on the bed.
Mom has arrested Samaria’s hands and is squeezing them in her own clawlike grip. Samaria disentangles one hand, and Mom turns her grip on me. She pinches my wrist. Hard. “Mom,” I say as firmly as I can without being nasty, “stop pinching me.” She mouths, “Help me.”
Clearly, Mom is terrified. “They’re going to kill me. They said they were going to kill me,” she whispers fiercely.
“Who?” I ask.
“Them,” hisses Mom, rolling her eyes toward Samaria, who is busily rolling up the damp sheet. Now Mom is tightly gripping the bed rail with both hands. “Don’t let them kill me,” she begs.
“No one will kill you, Mom. I won’t let them.” I pry Mom’s fingers from the bar carefully. Her skin is so fragile. Now Samaria is deftly sliding a dry sheet under Mom’s side. We turn her over slowly to the opposite side, pull the sheet under and tuck it in on the other side.
Now Samaria wants to change Mom’s shirt. With expert hands she quickly pulls Mom’s arm out of one sleeve. “Come on, Doris,” croons Samaria. “We’ll change your shirt and then you can have your dinner.”
“Oh, I can have my Dee-ner,” sneers Mom, her eyes widening in my direction, as if we are sharing a moment of private mirth. “’Change your shirt and you can have your DEE-ner.’” She is mocking Samaria. I am appalled.
Samaria dumps the wet things into the laundry basket. Mom struggles to raise her body up,to lift her skeletal legs over the railing. I watch silently, just to see if she can do it. But even with the adrenaline rush, she cannot even get one leg over.
“Mom, Mom,” I soothe, pulling her down onto the mattress with a hug. “Don’t go away now. Nothing bad will happen to you. I won’t let anything happen.”
As Samaria collects her things to leave, I take her aside to apologize. She waves me away. “She’s not so bad. I’ve seen much worse.”
Well, I haven’t. As Samaria leaves, she calls out, “Goodbye.” And Mom shouts weakly after her, “Shut up.”
The books and websites say that people with Alzheimer’s sometimes do and say things that are out of character. I never thought my mother, who has been unfailingly, and at times gratingly, polite all my life, would behave in such a crude manner. How can I love this person who seems not even to be my mother any more?
She cannot be trained, taught, or reasoned with. She can only be cared for. She can only be loved. There is nothing -nothing- I can do to change her behavior, and I cannot walk away. This is sounding so familiar. I have loved difficult people before. I have learned a few things. Forgive. Return a blessing. Seek peace and pursue it. Love doesn’t have adrenaline to give it a rush of strength which dissipates when the crisis is over. It just presses on.
