Dementia Narratives
Easy Days Are The Hardest
Dementia might test your patience the most on the “good days”
It was in so many ways a nondescript day. Dad was up at 8, dressed, bed made, sitting quietly on the couch when I went up.
He said good morning with his usual enthusiasm and happily said he’d get himself a coffee when I offered that the pot had finished brewing.
When I made him blueberry pancakes for breakfast he sat down at the table eagerly, smiling. “I can smell it,” he said. “Smells good!”
He finished his plate and then slept on the couch for 2 hours while I did his laundry and swept and organized.
We made a lunch of sandwiches for us and chicken rotini for him. He came to the table willingly but sat staring into space, food untouched as we ate. George asked after a while if he wasn’t hungry, or maybe wanted something else? “I could eat,” he answered. But he didn’t.
Still at the table, he points at George— or was he pointing out the window behind him? — and says with a shrug of resignation “Kids.” A few minutes later, now pointing into the living room, he says “Those kids. There’s the money. The mess.”
Was he pointing at the grandkids in the photo frames? Or seeing hallucinations of strange kids in the house?
He relaxed in his chair on the deck most of the afternoon, twice doing the stairs to survey the yard, quietly looking for “the asshole that did all this.” (Did what? Seeding the grass? Moving rocks?).
George makes pork chops with mushroom sauce and peas for dinner, cutting the pork into thin bite-size slices for Dad. Remembering last night’s performance, I turn to Dad before we eat and ask him if we can put some Polident in his dentures so they will fit better.
“You want to see my teeth?” he asks. “Can I see them?” I reply. He follows me to the bathroom and without much coaxing hands me his lower denture. “Here.”
I rinse and put in strips rather than paste because he wiped the paste out before putting the dentures back in last time. He fiddles with the upper denture before removing it. He gets his toothbrush and brushes his teeth in his hand, then puts the denture back in his mouth.
“There’s something wrong with it, something stuck,” he says, making faces.
“OK,” I say. “Let me help.”
“No. No. I got it.” he says, repeating “Something stuck.” More fiddling and out pops the remains of a hard candy that was lodged in one of the recesses.
Back in his mouth, they feel better… sort of. “Here, put this one in too I say,” handing him the lower denture. He puts it in upside down, then removes it and tries again. Now it’s the right way, but it feels weird.
“There’s stuff in there,” he says. He pulls it out and rubs at the Polident strip with his finger. “This stuff, it’s no good.”
“Put it back in and bite on it. Let it get soft so that they stick better in your mouth.”
“Where is the other one?” he says, getting agitated. “You do this and then what? Where is the other one?”
“It’s already in your mouth,” I say gently.
“No, there’s four. Where are they?” he demands, patting the counter. There’s only two, and they’re already in his mouth, but I’m not sure how to explain that to him at this point.
I extract myself from the bathroom to give him some space. In the end he leaves the dentures in, and comes back to the kitchen and we sit down to eat. He is annoyed, asking me why I do that. “Do you do it to your teeth, put that stuff on them? Where are your teeth?” he asks me.
He is hungry and cleans his dinner plate with the exception of the pork bites, which he spits out into a pile while flashing open-mouthed sarcastic chews to make his point.
He excuses himself politely from the table, and then spends 10 minutes spitting and coughing and polishing his dentures with a toothbrush and towel in the bathroom. If nothing else, he knows when they don’t feel right to him and spends the time to get the bother out of ’em, more or less.
It’s us and the food that are the problem apparently, not the fact that he refuses to use denture paste so that he can eat without his teeth clacking around in his mouth. Or so he can fall asleep on the couch without his dentures ending up on display in the southern hemisphere.
Tonight when I go up for coffee he jumps up to ask if he can get me anything, do anything for me before he goes to bed. He says he’s “ready to hit… ready to hit…,” pausing to find the word.
“The hay? Ready to hit the sack?” I ask. “Yes. My legs — I walked twice today just a little bit — they’re good so I’m going to do that again tomorrow.”
He goes to the bathroom to get himself ready for bed, wanders in his underwear for one more snack from the kitchen snack bar we set up for him, emerges again for the blanket that is on the couch, and then once more to say goodnight to George downstairs.
He is such a lovely, kind man but I find myself feeling frustrated with Dad today, my patience on the shortest fuse even though it’s not a bad day.
Later George confided to me that he felt the same way, noting that “Dad felt good about himself today, puffed up, feisty, and that’s what makes these days hard. When he is stubbornly pushing back on things that are meant to help him, he is not so easy to be patient with.”
“It’s a lot easier to feel empathy and want to help him when he’s struggling, like he was last week. When he’s like this — confident and headstrong — he’s more likely to hurt himself too.”
On days like this, helping Dad means finding a way to stay out of his way, while still keeping an eye on him.
Today’s lesson was ‘If he isn’t bothered, why are we?’ If his teeth are loose and he’s fine with it, why make an issue of it? Change perspective on the problem, find another tact, choose an alternative, find the compromise. We’ll just cut his meat into smaller bites from now on.
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