Yesterday was one of those days when Kate slept late. I tried to get her up around 10:00, but she wanted to sleep a little longer. I tried again at 10:30 and was successful.
When we got to Ellen’s memory care facility, she was in bed. She woke up quickly and was surprised to see us. That has been true the past four or five times we have visited her. Although she has been in memory care for at least two years, that is the only significant sign of her memory problem I have noticed. I know that her daughter tells her that we are coming. Ellen simply can’t remember. This is another reminder of how difficult it is for someone who is not around all the time to detect memory issues. To me, this has to be one of the biggest differences in caring for a parent and a spouse. It is much easier to see the signs of dementia for a spouse than for a parent. I was living in the same town as my mother and visiting her regularly and missed the earliest signs.
Having said that, I do notice more change in Ellen with each visit. At first, it was just the her speech. On subsequent visits her aphasia lessened so that we could understand about 60-70% of what she said. We found that challenging. Now we only understand about a third of what she says. That makes conversation even harder. It requires Ellen to repeat things a lot. For us, it means asking a lot of “yes/no” questions for clarification. Fortunately, she seems to understand everything we say. She clearly knows who we are, and she recognizes the names of mutual friends and acquaintances we mention. In fact, her understanding is so good that she seems misplaced in memory care. I don’t mean that she really is, just that it seems that way to casual observers like us.
It was a beautiful day yesterday. For the first time, we visited her on a back porch. We had been there about thirty minutes when Kate said she needed a restroom. I located an attendant who took her. This was the first time I had been alone with Ellen since her stroke over three years ago. For that reason, I have never said anything to her about Kate and how she is doing. After Kate left, Ellen put her hand on my knee and said, “How do you do it?” I was taken aback by her asking, but I answered, “With pleasure.” In the few moments we had, I explained how fortunate we had been and that even with her severe loss of memory, we are still enjoying ourselves. I also told her that we are going through big changes and that she sometimes doesn’t know me or herself. She didn’t ask any more questions before Kate was back.
As I have done on two previous visits, I brought my iPad and played about 30-40 minutes of music on YouTube. We started with “The Piano Man” with Billy Joel and Kevin Spacey at the Gershwin Award and followed that with a beautiful performance of “Don’t Cry for me Argentina” sung by Andrea Bocelli and Nicole Scherzinger. From there we went to several different choral works before it was time to leave.
This time it seemed much harder for Ellen to see us leave. I felt almost the way I did recently when I left Kate with a sitter. I know this was difficult for Ellen because we are about the only people from Knoxville that have been able to visit with her. I know of one other couple who were her neighbors. They have visited her once. I think one or two others from her church may have visited her the first year. This seems tragic to me. Ellen was very well known and liked in Knoxville and is a people person. For her to be in a memory care facility with few others with whom she can communicate must be depressing. I told her we would be back and that we would keep coming as long as we can.
