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Illustration by Christine Wei
“When am I going home?”
My mother looks up at me from her recliner in the nursing home she moved into a few weeks ago. Dementia has dulled her once-sharp mind, but her eyes are a bright, questioning blue. How can I break her heart daily by telling her that she will live out the end of her days here?
“Not today,” I say.
For the hundredth time, I force a cheerfulness into my voice and steer her away from what troubles her to topics she enjoys: the antics of my cats, the achievements of her grandchildren and the weather – always the weather. Somehow, a description of sunshine or a rain shower is enough to reassure her that all is well with the world. This distraction calms her.
With dementia, the idea of reality becomes blurred as an imaginary life takes hold. When dementia creates its own truth, there is no good that will come of insisting that this is now her home. If it doesn’t feel like home to her, it isn’t. Even if I tell her that it is, daily.
Despite being surrounded by her photos, furniture and mementos, she dreams of a far-off place of safety and love and considers that her home. But where is this place? Is it her childhood home, the one she shared with my father, my house? There is no way to know, so I take her hand in mine and put reality aside, trying to connect with her, wherever she is.
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This conversation will soon be forgotten, but the idea of home will stay. Tomorrow, she will look up at me with those innocent blue eyes and ask again. And again, I will respond, disingenuously. “Not today.”
Lies, white lies, seem the kindest thing I can offer.
Below her window, the subway rumbles, but she sits, oblivious, so unlike the sharp-eared sleeper that jolted awake with every creak in the floorboards when I stumbled home after a teenage late night out.
Those nights, too, my mother’s questions were met with distraction and redirection. A funny anecdote was all that was needed to allay her fears of what I was up to. I recounted these details from the other side of the room, afraid that the godawful smell of gin and Mountain Dew would seep through my pores and reach her. I told my stories. She laughed. We lived in a fragile balance of deception, much like now.
In my teenage years, the white lies were told to avoid rebuke – and, in a way, they still are. There’s no danger of being grounded now. These days, it is the sharp sting of guilt that I try to avoid.
Before the retirement home, my mother lived with my husband, our two children and I. We struggled for more than two years, but as her needs increased, caring for her at home became an impossibility.
Although my mother agreed that a move to an institution would be best, on the actual moving day, she was unable to comprehend what was happening. She was anxious while I packed up her room, directing me to not forget this and to remember to do that. After the move, she sat in her new room, surrounded by pieces of her old life, confused. She was a lost child, deserted.
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“Why don’t you want me anymore?” she asked, a knife to my heart.
I dreaded returning the next day, dreaded seeing her pain and her sense of betrayal. I rode the elevator to her room feeling the weight of her emotions.
Dementia comes with small gifts, though. When I arrived, my mother was all smiles, listening to Christmas carols and admiring the small artificial tree in the corner. She had forgotten her pain and was delighted by the glinting lights and decorations. We went over to take a closer look, our wounds temporarily healed.
I love these days, when all is well with her world, but dementia doesn’t allow her to stay happy long. Being left alone, for any period of time, paints everything grey. Her sense of time has become detached from reality, a victim of her emotions. Time becomes elastic. As the lovelorn Romeo says, “sad hours seem long.”
Two days without a visit and my mother tells me she’s missed me, that I haven’t been to see her in weeks. After a bout with the flu keeps me home for a week, the staff tells me that my mother claimed I hadn’t been to see her in two years. She’d been at the home less than two months at the time.
When I am finally able to visit after the flu, I distract her with sugar cookies and a funny story of how, while baking them, the sugar bag exploded, covering my kitchen counter in a layer of white, like snow. She laughs and I relax, the emotional landmine of my perceived neglect temporarily disarmed.
The guilt, though, remains. I know the move to a retirement home has been good. And most days, so does she. The crushing loneliness is gone; there are caring people to cater to her needs and there are music programs which she loves. She’s settling in well, but still, the questions come.
“When am I going home?”
“Soon, mum, soon.”
Lisa Goodchild lives in Toronto.
