View From a Prairie Home

by Hege Hernfindahl, Columnist

The long goodbye is often used to describe a person with dementia. I am not saying I am an expert on dementia, but like many people, I have experienced people I love get dementia and slowly become less and less cognizant of their surroundings as their brain gradually turned more and more sluggish. And at the end, they would die. The cause of death would be hard to identify, but it seemed to their loved ones that they had been slowly dying for quite a while.

My mother had a Ph.D. in Applied Economics and went on to work as a tax researcher for the Norwegian government. At the time, most economists were men and at the time of her funeral, women who had worked for her told me, my mother had been their inspiration and role model. She retired at 70 and became an expert at complaining about other people. She had never been easy to get along with at home, always wanting perfection and control of her family. But after she retired, she got worse. It was after a stay with her, that my husband Grant told me, he thought my mother was getting senile. He was almost an expert on dementia having taken care of his father who had gradually descended into senility.

With both my mother and my father-in-law, it started with repeating stories and getting less patient with people. I know that if you are a story teller, you will repeat stories, but this was different. The story was repeated often in the same sentence and sometimes five or six times in the same hour. Both also started having problems with managing their finances. My father-in-law would not watch out for scams and ended up paying outrageous sums for having the old, falling-down barn painted, for instance. My mother just stopped paying her bills.

There were also signs on the way that they could no longer live at home. My mother almost started the house on fire by putting a package of cheese in the oven and then forgetting about it. My father-in-law drove the tractor with a chisel plow on top of the barbed-wire fence. He also would escape in a car and the police had to help finding him.

It is not easy to put your mother, father or spouse in a nursing home. But it is done with love by a caretaker that can no longer manage the many problems living with a person with dementia entails. Grant’s mother could not lift his father if he fell. My brother realized my mother was no longer safe by herself. Both felt guilty. Grant’s mother visited her husband every day. My brother spent many hours searching for a perfect care facility for our mother. When I came to visit, he made it a point to show me the view and had me meet the wonderful people who worked there.

My mother gradually became docile and slept a lot. My father-in-law thought he was in a fancy hotel. My mother, the physically active woman, could hardly walk and fell multiple times. As I flew home to be with her, she died. My father-in-law fell into a coma-like state, yet he could eat and breathe until he finally died after having been bed-ridden for two years.

And now, both Grant and I are approaching the ages where our parents got dementia. Yesterday, and not for the first time, I walked around the house looking for my glasses. We both spend more time searching for words. But we try to do activities that might help prevent us from following in our parents’ footsteps. We try to be physically active. We both read a lot. Grant does the crossword puzzle and I work on improving my French. Learning a new language engages both the left and the right part of the brain and is said to be a good preventative tool. Only time will tell. Another reminder to live for the moment. It is all we have.