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My Mom’s Dementia Journey
Looking back, I think we all knew mom was losing her memory. There was the time she left four messages in a half-hour on my machine, all saying the same thing. Or the time I found her transfixed by a Mexican television show even though she doesn’t speak Spanish. Or the time she ordered broccoli soup at a restaurant despite the fact she’d spent her entire life referring to broccoli as a filthy weed.
The event that shattered our denial was terrifying. My parents were living in Palm Springs. It was the heart of summer and temperatures exceeded 105 degrees. We still don’t know where she was headed. I received a call from my father at 7:00 on a Friday night. He said mom was missing. She’d been gone several hours and wasn’t answering her cell phone. I heard the fear in his voice as he asked me what to do.
“Call the police,” I told him.
“What do I say?”
“Tell them your wife is confused, that she has memory issues.”
This was the first time anyone in our family acknowledged what now seems obvious. We’d tried to hide from it. We told ourselves mom was simply getting older, that she was bored or depressed or losing her hearing. The truth was too hard to accept. Mom was slowly slipping away.
Dad finally received a call from mom around 9:30 pm. She had no idea where she was. She’d…
