I have started to think that the universe doesn’t want me to take a walk . . . at least that’s what I’m telling myself. For the past two nights, it’s either been raining when I got home or a storm has been on the way, with thunder rumbling. So my grand plans for getting out and walking haven’t come through.
Oh well – we’ve still had a couple of good days anyway.
Last night, I was putting together my online list for the Wal-Mart shopping app so I could pick up our groceries Saturday morning. I still love, love, love this service! M was getting his lunch together for Friday.
M: I only have one more protein pack left. Me: It’s on the list – I’m picking up more of them Saturday morning. M: I just used the last of the applesauce. Me: It’s on the list – I’m picking up more of them Saturday morning. M: I’m out of cashews. Me: It’s on the list – I’m picking up more of them Saturday morning.
I felt like a broken record. (Now THERE’S a dated reference!!) We get the same items for his lunches every week, and yet he was in panic mode because we were running out of them. SMH.
This should be a good (and busy!) weekend. The local single-A baseball team is playing tonight, so I see peanuts and cotton candy in my future. Then, tomorrow night, there’s an old theater downtown that is showing the first three Star Wars movies (numbers 4, 5 & 6) at 4 pm, 7 and 10 pm) and M agreed we should go see them again on the big screen. I can’t believe he agreed to it – but I think it will be a ton of fun! Popcorn for supper!
As it’s the first day of summer – and the days will now start to get shorter – I hope everyone gets the opportunity to get outside and enjoy some sunshine and blue skies. What is that phrase we heard all last year? Winter is coming. Ha!
Yesterday evening started badly, and went steadily downhill. Went I walked in the door, M came in the kitchen and said, “Where have you been?” It was 5:40. I left the office at my usual time and had come straight home.
I looked at the clock and then looked at him and asked him what he meant. He said he had been looking for me to be home at 5 o’clock. That was my clue – right there – that things were not as they should be, but I missed it (I’ll never be a detective) so I stupidly and naively told him there was no way I could be home at 5 and went on with my evening.
I should have gone back to the car and driven away.
We went to the grocery store for a few items then I started making cookies for a family get together that’s coming up this weekend. Of course, right in the middle of the mixing, I realized I didn’t have enough oatmeal for the recipe. So I asked M to run back to the shopping center, go to the ATM and get $160 (some money for our graduating niece, some for this weekend and some to buy the oatmeal) and then get the oatmeal. I even took a picture of the oatmeal canister with his phone so he would know exactly what to get.
As I’m telling him this, he gets a piece of paper, says “one hundred sixty” and writes 100 . . .
I see what he’s written and I say to him “one – six – zero.”
It takes him a minute, but he gets it.
He’s gone for the longest time, but when he comes back, he tells me he couldn’t figure out the ATM, but he got the oatmeal.
At first, I thought I would take him back to the ATM and have a lesson in how it works. But then, I thought better of that. What’s the point?
Later in the evening, cookies are baking in the oven and I’m on the front porch, watering flowers. M comes outside to help, so I asked him to water the flowers around the mailbox and on the other side of the driveway while I go back inside to get the cookies out of the oven. This will involve attaching a second garden hose to the first to be able to reach the street.
When I come back outside, the hose reel box, which the first garden hose is connected to, has been disconnected from the spigot. The first (green) garden hose has also been disconnected from the hose reel box and M is standing in the yard holding the end of the green garden hose which has a sprayer attached to it and the wrong end of the second (gray) garden hose. Eerily reminiscent of the Christmas 2017 incident with the candles for the windows (see “The Beginning”.)
I didn’t lose my cool. I calmly told him to disconnect the sprayer and get the other end of the gray hose. Then connect the gray and green hoses together. While he did that, I reconnected the hose reel box to the green hose and to the spigot again and by then we were ready to water.
Finally we were back in the house and he opened the refrigerator and saw a package of strawberries that had gotten moldy (yes, we are one of those families that had let their strawberries go bad, just like that commercial!) and he asked if I had seen it. Yes, I had, I just hadn’t had a moment to do anything about it.
Then he asked if I wanted to throw them away.
I don’t know why that question was the one that set me off. It really shouldn’t have. All I had to say was “yes.” But, it was as though there was a red haze on the edge of my vision and I lost it!
No – I don’t want to throw them away. I’m going to start making moldy strawberry jam and moldy strawberry shortcake.
As you can imagine, that set him off and he threw them in the trash WITH A BANG, so I picked them out and sent the strawberries down the disposal and put the plastic container in the recycling (because that’s SO important!!)
Deep breath.
I went outside and called one of my brothers. No answer. Thank goodness I have four to choose from. So I went down the list and called the next one. He answered (I imagine he’s sorry now that he did.) and I just unloaded all of this on him.
I cried and told him (brother A) that I needed him to talk me off the ledge, but he told me it’s only one foot down, so I might as well go ahead and jump. Which made me laugh – as intended. As we talked about everything that had happened this evening, he pointed out that I had really done all of this to myself.
What?
Except for the time coming home, I’ve got to stop depending on M to do anything – he can’t do it. And that’s on me to change my expectations. And as A said, I have to look at all these things that we currently do and decide:
delegate it do it myself dump it – just forget about it
In this day and time, there are too many services out there ready, willing and able to help me with things that need to be done. I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now that I needed to get by Petsmart to get some things for the dogs. Duh – Petsmart has an online purchase option and they deliver. Even if it costs a little bit, it would be worth it to have it off my mind and done.
And I’m going to have to delegate. My dad has been nagging me for two weeks to get a flower arrangement put on the headstone at his parents’ (my grandparents’) graves. It’s important to him, but not important enough for him to do himself – he wants me to do it. I had an arrangement from a previous year in my garage and I had planned to get to the store to get new silk flowers for it. This morning I called my mom and asked her to take it (the current one with the faded flowers from the previous year) out to the cemetery and put it on the headstone. Now it’s done, I can get new flowers if I find the time, but no one will be nagging me about it.
This isn’t easy – and it’s only going to get harder. I thought this dementia progression was going to slow down or stabilize, but it sure hasn’t. I thought I was ready to handle things on my own, but I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not there yet.
A did say, and this is also very true, that I need to stop worrying about things like watering flowers and baking cookies and I need to spend this time with M doing things like taking walks and going to ball games. I don’t think A understands how much joy both M and I get from my cookie baking – me in the baking and M in the eating – but I get the general idea. This is the time for making good memories. That’s what is important and what I need to be concentrating on. This having to work everyday is REALLY keeping me from living my best life. HA!
Yesterday was a strange one. Cloudy all day and it looked as though it was going to rain, but never did. M said he stayed in bed until noon, but he had vacuumed the entire house before I got home, which was a nice surprise. He was feeling fine and had eaten dinner by the time I got home, so we took the dogs and went for a walk.
Later, we were watching TV and a commercial came on for “Game of Thrones.” He and I saw the very first episode of that show at my brother & sister-in-law’s house several weeks ago when we visited with them. We’ve talked about it a couple of times since then and agreed that if we watched a few more episodes it might grow on us but, based on that first one, we didn’t really like it. Last night, he said: “Have you ever watched that show?” Me: Game of Thrones? M: Yeah – have you ever seen it? Me: Yes, you and I watched it together at J and T’s house. We said we didn’t like it. M: Okay.
And then he went on with whatever he had been doing.
Later there were some forms he needed to sign and date. Very simple – signature and date (4-9-19). There were sticky arrows on each paper that even said “sign and date here” so there was no question about what was needed and where it was needed. For each paper, I had to repeat, not only “sign and date” but “four dash nine dash nineteen.” For every. Single. Paper.
But here’s the good thing – he doesn’t get upset or angry or frustrated. He just laughs and keeps on going. I’m incredibly grateful for that, because I know it could be so different. He could really lose his temper and be unpleasant to deal with during these forgetful times. I have to remember to be thankful that he is accepting all of this so well.
Busy weekend. Being under the weather for the past week or so, M and I hadn’t gone grocery shopping since we got back from CA and the cupboard was looking pretty bare. My parents, our older son and his family were all coming to dinner Sunday night and we were watching two of our grandchildren Sunday afternoon, so we didn’t have time to get in a serious shopping trip – we only had time for one of us to run to the store and pick up the essentials for dinner.
So we put together a list for dinner and M said he would run to the store. The menu for the evening was grilled hamburgers so we were trying to put together a list of items to go with this dinner. M kept suggesting things like “lunch meat for next week” and “apple sauce for lunch.” I couldn’t seem to get him to understand that this trip to the store was ONLY for dinner and that we were going back to do our week’s worth of shopping after dinner.
On his way out the door, he looked at the list and saw hamburger patties. He asked me where in the store he would find hamburger patties. This is someone who has been to the grocery store as often as I have over our 35 years together.
This morning, as M was walking out the door to go to work, he realized he had forgotten to get his cell phone and his iPod, but he had his big lunch box on his shoulder. As he walked through the kitchen to get the rest of his stuff, M knocked a dish off the counter and it broke. It’s just a dish – it doesn’t matter . . . but it was one of my grandmother’s dishes. There were only three of them, and now there are two. Of course, he feels terrible about it and I know it was an accident. BUT STILL!!!! A friend suggested putting things like that away “for a while.” Wish I had done it sooner.
Yesterday, I had a really interesting opportunity. Every month, there is a prayer luncheon for working women at the local Salvation Army office. It’s always a fun time of fellowship with a good message for the month. Yesterday, I was asked to share what M and I have been going through with his diagnosis.
All of the women in the group were so lovely and so supportive! Those who have dealt with family members with the same dementia diagnosis all said “You’re going to have to be EXTREMELY patient.” I think we’ve talked about me and the fact that I have no patience. That really is my number one struggle.
Last night, M said that he had stopped at the gas station on the way home and the gas credit card hadn’t worked. He couldn’t explain why it hadn’t worked for him, just that he was unable to get gas using it. He did remember that I didn’t want him to use his debit card at the gas pump (yay!) and came home without getting gas. I rode back to the gas station with him, watched him use the gas credit card and it worked just fine. I don’t know what the problem was earlier, unless it was asking for his zip code and he was inputting his debit card four-digit code instead.
Then, when it was time for bed, he said that the dogs had gotten mud on his bed and he was going to change his sheets. I got a new set of sheets out for him and a clean comforter, while he put the dirty sheets and comforter in the wash. When he made the bed, he only put the bottom (fitted) sheet and the comforter on the bed. When I said something about not having put on the top sheet, he said “What difference does it make?”
And it doesn’t matter. It’s not important. If he wants to sleep with just the comforter, it’s fine. But I was tired, I had worked all day, I guess I’m still not feeling 100% and that just ran all over me. I snatched up that top sheet and marched it back down the hall to the linen closet. And the whole way there, I could hear the women from lunch saying “you’re going to have to be extremely patient” and I wanted to have a fit!! Sometimes I think it’s a wonder I haven’t just exploded into a million tiny pieces.
Then I take a deep breath and remind myself that it really doesn’t matter. Sheets and debit cards aren’t the important things. I’m going to get there!!
