In an earlier post, I talked about two ways that COVID changed our lives. One was isolating us after nine years of active lives that kept us enjoying life and each other. The other was Sarah’s hospitalization with COVID. Each of these required us to focus on new ways to enjoy life.
Some of the things we did prior to the pandemic were things that we could do afterward as well. That included our collection of family photobooks that contain a variety of historical family information and photos.
Of course, music played a major role in our lives but in different ways. We couldn’t attend concerts, so we added another way to enjoy music. We started watching music videos on YouTube. That gave us a wide variety of music we could tap into at any time of day.
Before the pandemic, Kate’s only self-initiated activity was working jigsaw puzzles on her iPad 6-8 hours a day. She lost that ability during the first week of the pandemic. That put more pressure on me to entertain her.
One of the ways I did that was to act as a docent in our home. There were stories that went along with many of the pieces of furniture as well as paintings and knick-knacks. At that stage of Alzheimer’s, she would quickly forget what I told her, so that made it easy to tell her the same stories over and over.
It was during the pandemic that Kate experienced what is common among people with dementia. She wanted to go home. The obvious answer to this is to say, “We are at home”. I knew it made no sense to contradict her; she didn’t realize she was at home. I would say, “Well, let’s do that.” Then we went to the car and drove around for 15-30 minutes and came back home. Some days, we did that as many as three times. It never failed. Each time we arrived home, she was pleased to be there, at least until the next time.
Activities like these kept us going until both of us got COVID in November, 2020. More about that in a later post.
