Personality Developed - Changes in Habits

During the waiting period,  the progression of her failing memory and ability to make any sort of rational decisions about almost anything moved quickly. We weren't really sure if we'd be able to hold out until there was a room available. Not only that, I was ambivalent about having to put her in a home. I really didn't want to. I wanted to be able to keep her home and safe, but it was becoming much harder to do so, and her safety was really the uppermost thought in my mind.

The sleeping pills began to fail - I guess her body got used to them, and they no longer kept her asleep through the entire night. One morning I arrived to find her still in bed, sleeping. But on the stove was a frying pan burnt nearly black, with a charred lump of coal in the middle. I think it had once been a pork chop, but it was apparent she'd put it on sometime through the night. How she eventually knew enough to turn off the burner, I don't know. I remember looking in the pan and thinking to myself "what is that"?

That was one of the first moments of clarity for me - realizing she could have caused a fire in her apartment, possibly spreading through the building to the homes of others living there. Not only was I afraid for her own safety, but now began to worry about the tenants in the entire apartment building. I knew at that point, leaving her alone at night was an option that I no longer really had.

There were many little things such as that - I'd open the cupboard to get out a tea cup and find the milk instead. Keeping up with her now became a game of hide and seek - you'd need to check every cupboard, every day just in case.

Some days, I couldn't get her into the tub because she'd insist there were "bugs" there. There weren't - not in this apartment. It was clean as a whistle, and none of the apartments in this small building had bugs of any kind ... oh, the odd fly or mosquito from opening the balcony door, but not the kind of bugs she meant. Cockroaches. Her condo was flooded with them, for years. Not really through any fault of their own, but because of the building itself. There were many cultures living in that huge condo - some who believed one shouldn't kill anything at all - ever. My parents had their condo sprayed for bugs every 3 or 4 months, for years, to try and keep the bugs down, but they always came back. It used to give me the heebie-jeebies to stay at their place ... my mind would conjure bugs everywhere.

And then there was THE purse...she carried that purse everywhere. When she went to bed, it went with her, or into the bathroom, or the kitchen - even if she was just going to put her tea cup in the sink. It never left her arm. And it weighed a ton. She'd sometimes put the oddest things into her purse: a single sock, a bar of soap, a used tea bag or half eaten cookie, a rock - nearly always things that were hers, although on rare occasions would grab something that was mine, like a book or magazine. I'm not sure why because although she could still read words, she could no longer make sense of them. She knew what most words meant if you were speaking to her, but in a written sentence, she had no cognizant ability left, so while she more or less knew what the individual words meant, the meaning of the entire sentence would be lost on her.

Strangely, around this point my mom developed a sense of humour. And it was so odd to watch her laugh at things that would barely have made her crack a smile before. In some ways, it was easier, though a little unusual. Because I had always had a sense of humour that was very similar to dad's, (and she had almost none) she almost never laughed at the same things I did. Now, I'd find myself laughing at some bit of commercial on the TV channel she was watching, and she'd laugh right along with me. My first inclination was that she was simply laughing because I was, but I'd find her laughing at a little bird's antics or squirrel on the balcony railing I hadn't seen, or at the way her clothes fit.