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Then adjust to the idea that this disease is not curable and will progress at varying rates. Find help for you to assist mom. Make time for yourself, or the disease will consume you too. And keep coming to this site. There is much help and support here from others that have walked in your shoes.
https://www.agingcare.com/articles/communicating-with-dementia-patients-150914.htm
Updated August 23, 2018. Check it out.
Today she called me while I was with a friend and told me my pet was gone. She was hysterical and hung up the phone on me when I asked her to check the bathroom.
My friend saw how worried I was and we cut our trip short, I was driven back home. The pet was sleeping in the bathroom. Everything was fine.
My friend tried to give me advice as we drove back to get my car from their place, where we'd carpooled from.
I got angry because I was being treated like the problem was that I lacked social skills for how to talk to my own mother, that if I'd been more savvy, then she would have checked the room and not hung up on me while shouting/freaking out.
I let the anger percolate for a minute then said "that would be good advice if this was my mother from 10 years ago. But each month she is a new person and learning how to cope with her is a moving target. There is no solution or right way because for every day that goes by, she loses capacity."
And I realized what I said felt extremely true.
Coming to peace with the mother I knew being gone is a lightening of the burden because I can let go of all the old patterns and expectations and just do what feels right now.
I put up a Christmas tree and for the first time in her life my mother did not rip me apart because there was a nazi-rigerous and frighteningly stringent way to decorate a tree. I bought a bright blue, pre-lit plastic tree from walmart, and covered it with clip-on birds of all different species, with a sun as the topper.
She was delighted and referred to me as her "Christmas angel" while my jaw hung open. My mother would insist on a blue sprice of specifc height, lights hung first, primary colored large bulb, then multipattern tony white twinkle lights, double garland only clockwise, then ornaments in a precise pattern and order, tree topper made of delucate spun glass to be placed on top by a child (why???), special tinsel, then setting a specific speed of rotation on the electric tree stand. It was hell and I quailed even thinking about Christmas trees during my adult life.
Ad suddenly, I can put up a tree and there will be no insanity or negativity, just pleasant joy at the colorful spectacle. Holy sh**.
This new person may help you find resolution through the loss of the old person, it is a prolonged and painful goodbye but the bad goes away with the good and being free of those patterns can be healing.