Human beings are, by nature and habit, prone to entropy and pattern. It is hard for us to make changes unless changes are forced upon us. How many times do we wake up, look around, and realize we’ve been drinking the same coffee every day for five years, or been in the same job for a decade, or the same house for as long as we can remember?
I’ll never forget the day my grandpa fell in the shower and couldn’t get up. Thankfully, the cordless phone was close enough to reach, so he called my mom. Without saying a single word, she got in her car and drove an hour to my grandpa’s home to help him up. He was pretty injured from the fall, and my mom was devastated. That’s when she decided to help him move into a nursing home.
We had a frequent guest, Jean, who had grown up in Chicago. She told us how when she and her children were looking into nursing homes, she used lessons learned from her very first apartment search. Her first apartment was right near the El tracks, and she said that every time a train went by, the water in the shower would stop. Of course, she didn’t know that before she moved in.
“There are only four kinds of people in this world: those who have been caregivers, those who currently are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.” This earnest prediction by former First Lady Rosalynn Carter could feel constricting—or we could learn to take it in stride. We are all aging simultaneously, of course: Each day, we grow one day older together. But a disproportionate segment of our population is aging toward retirement and toward expanded needs for home care and other specialty resources. We know this to be true, and we can adapt and prepare ourselves as we are called to shift our roles, responsibilities, and generosity.
If you’re a caregiver of an aging adult who suffers from dementia, take a brief moment out of your current activities and mental flow to read the following statements. Read them one at a time, and be open to and aware of your reactions or responses—mental, physical, and emotional.
Where do we go when our mind betrays us and when the person that we have been our whole lives gets lost in the recesses of our brain? It’s a question with deep and often terrible philosophical, moral, and emotional implications, and the lack of an answer is one of the crueler parts of dementia and Alzheimer’s for a sufferer’s loved ones. But there is also a more tangible, though no-less-difficult, question: Where should they go?
Holly says she feels like a completely different person than she used to be, and she doesn’t even know who this new person is. Just a year ago, she was a full-time elementary school teacher while working toward her master’s in school administration. She rode her mountain bike on the weekends through the Big Basin Boulder Creek Loop and other South Bay Area trails with her riding group.
For 30 years, Joshua had a routine of climbing San Francisco’s Filbert Steps twice a week. He did it for the views, the exercise, and the interaction with other climbers—many of them tourists who had heard the steps would be a challenge but didn’t realize there were quite so many! Joshua, who is now 73, says he got pretty good at distracting the visitors during their climb by telling them about other great places they should visit in the city, and people were always grateful for his two-part generosity. But in the last five years or so, as his balance became unpredictable, Joshua felt uncomfortable making the climb.
It’s one of the strange ironies of life that when you need your memory the least, you have the most of it. When you are younger, you barely have to think about things like medicine, what to eat, or how to handle a routine. You can throw anything into your body and be fine. But older adults who have a stricter medical regiment also are the most likely to suffer lapses in memory and difficulty holding onto routines.
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