The Mom Situation

I’ve been trying to decide over the past several days whether I wanted to write a blog post about this, but I think I kind of have to since everything else in my life is, in practical terms, affected by it.

My mother (80) has been diagnosed with dementia, and is currently in a facility specializing in treating dementia patients. She’d been failing to pay bills even though she had the money, wasn’t taking care of herself physically, and was having problems remembering things. It’s come on by inches over years. I had assumed until recently it was just her getting old, that her mental lapses were just because she’s inactive, unchallenged. My sister came down from Mass and this past Thursday took her to see a social worker, who had her see a nurse, who put her in the facility for evaluation.

I don’t know if she’ll ever be coming home. The first doctor’s evaluation recommended her being placed somewhere where there’s staff trained to deal with someone in her condition. I haven’t talked to her since Friday, though my sister has. I don’t know what I’d say. She called me to beg me to come pick her up and take her home, and of course I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to: she’s a ward of the state. They told us not to visit until after the doctors were done evaluating her because it would make it harder. So I get to feel guilty about that, too.

So I’ve been cleaning… it’s been therapeutic. Certain rooms of the house — the dining room, her upstairs computer room, and her bedroom — had gotten significantly hoarder-ey. I’ve managed to clean the dining and computer rooms. The number of bags of trash and recyclables I’ve taken out already amazed even me. The amount of dust I’ve inhaled in the past 3 days would stop a team of horses. The bedroom is going to be a week-long project. It’s going to be mostly magazines and books and clothes, but I think I’m going to need to rent/buy a new vacuum to deal with the dust. My sister, who has been dealing with the legal/medical stuff while I clean, is going back to Mass Wednesday night for Thanksgiving, she has a job and a toddler and other responsibilities. Coming back in a couple weeks probably. I’ll be alone in the interim.

I’m not going to go into how all this dovetails with my own life situation, which is profoundly bad also, because I really just need not to think about it, in order to stay functioning and do for my mother what needs to be done day-to-day.