Little things around the house

It bothers her when the light in the mud room is on, or the lights in the back yard. But she always asks if she can turn them off. She thinks I may have a reason for leaving them on, which I never do. Last night she came into the living room with an anxious look, waving her hands toward the back of the house. She said, "Is...? Can...? Oh, I don't..." And she started to turn away discouraged. "Turn off the light?" I said. She spun around and pointed her index finger at me. "YES!," she said, "THANK YOU!" And she was off to darken the mud room.

***

Today I was standing at the pantry door, trying to figure out what to have for lunch. It was complicated by the fact that it was 2:30 in the afternoon, and my decision would have dinner implications. May arrived and stared silently with me into the canned goods. She was the first to speak. "I used to know how to do this. I could just look in there and pick out something to fix. I guess I've forgotten how to do that."

Laughter in the house!

"When is Ted coming?"

"Is Ted here?"

"Have you heard from Ted?"

Those questions have been constant for almost a week. So finally last night I said, "What's this obsession with Ted? He's not here. He's not coming. He's at work. I don't know when he's coming. Don't ask me about him anymore."

I said it in a nice way; she chuckled and said she would try to stop asking.

An hour later she says, "Is Adam downstairs by himself?" "Yeah," I say, thinking, if we're upstairs, of course he's downstairs by himself. Who would be with him? "Oh, I get it," I say. "You can't ask if Ted's here, so you'll just ask if Adam's by himself. Like, who else could possibly be with him?" She thinks that's funny, so I decide to play it for all it's worth.

"You sly fox," I tease. "Who could be downstairs with Adam? Oh yeah, that guy I'm not supposed to ask about! Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat..."

She laughs hard, and possibly revels in the fact that she's been called a sly fox. I laugh too. It feels really good to be laughing together.

Another hour goes by, and I'm sitting at my desk thinking about how I might tell this story in a blog entry. She looks at me and asks what I'm smiling about. I tell her I'm just remembering her sly way of asking if Ted is here. Her face contorts in a manner that says, give me more clues, I don't know what you're talking about. So I tell her the whole story and she enjoys it all over it again. As do I. Two good laughs before bedtime. Best medicine there is.

Clean? Or dirty?

She points to a plastic tub on the floor and says, "I don't know if those are clean or dirty. I guess I should just start over." In the tub are fluffy brown towels and a brown bed sheet. Next to the tub is an ironing board with a brown shirt on it. I consider the evidence thoughtfully. "Well," I say, "you obviously were ironing a brown shirt. It must have been clean. Everything in the tub is brown. My observation is that you typically go to the basement with dirty laundry that's all mixed up, and come back with clean laundry sorted by color. I think you separated all the brown stuff in the basement, washed it, then brought it back here. You stopped over there to iron the shirt. I say, these towels and this sheet are clean." That makes sense to her, so I go back to what I was doing.

Twenty minutes later, she says, "I guess I'm going to just wash this again. I don't know if it's clean or dirty." To which I say, "You know, it's all brown. That makes me think it's been sorted, washed, dried, and brought back here. So I say its clean." I take the shirt upstairs to hang it up. She disappears with the tub.

Several hours later she's back with the tub.

"I don't know if these are clean or dirty..."

"CLEAN!"

She takes the towels out and starts folding them on the couch. On about the third towel, she turns and says, "You know, I didn't ask to be like this..." There are tears on her cheeks.

But she was no longer asking if the laundry was clean or not.

Lunch amnesia

She's not feeling well because of a cold. I asked her if she would like to get out of the house and go to lunch, or would she rather eat here. She couldn't decide. I said if it didn't matter, I'd rather stay home and I would fix her something. I went downstairs and warmed up some leftover chicken and rice and took it to her in the living room. She said thanks, and I came back upstairs to work.

Thirty minutes later she appears in my workspace and says, "Are we going to lunch?" She can tell by the way I look at her that something is wrong. I ask her if she ate what I gave her, and she doesn't know. I walk with her downstairs to see if there's any evidence. She finds a half-eaten bowl of chicken and rice in the kitchen and holds it up for me to see. This is upsetting to her, that she ate and doesn't remember. I go back to work.

Another thirty minutes later, she shows up with her purse in hand and says, "So, when are we going to lunch?" Again she reads the look on my face. I tell her she already ate, and she remembers enough to be really upset. She's sleeping now.

***

Last night I was de-cluttering a room. I was about three-quarters finished, with a pile of stuff on the floor that needed to go to the trash or to the basement. The phone rang, and while I took the call, she decided to "help" by putting everything back on the shelves I had just emptied. I couldn't mask a slight irritation when I came back. After I had taken the stuff back off the shelves and made several trips to the garbage can and the basement, she looked at me and said, "I'm not going to get any better am I?"

A night out

We drove into Chicago last night, to attend a focus group for early onset Alzheimer's patients and caregivers -- patients in one room and caregivers in another. At the end, the patients came into our room and May's face was aglow. She loves getting together with these people. She searched for the words to express what she was feeling. It came out something like this:

"Is there a way for all of us to ... uh ... do this again ... without any fru-fru (wave of the hands). It's just so good to sit and talk."

Afterward, one of the patients came over and said she and May should get together and ride bikes, so we gave her our phone number. On the way home, I told her what went on in my room, what people had said and what I had said (not much). I described all the people who were there, the ones we knew and the ones who were new to us, and reminded her what each of their stories were. She asked me several times, "What's next?" Each time I explained that this was the second focus group we had been to, but there was no structure in place for ongoing meetings. All in all, a rich and touching conversation for 30 minutes. Two blocks from home, the following Q&A broke out:

"Where did we go tonight?"

"You don't know where we went?"

"No."

"I'm going to ask you some questions. I'm not trying to make it hard on you. I just need to know how your brain is working."

"Okay."

"Can you remember anything about this evening?"

"No."

"Do you know how long we've been out of the house?"

"Two or three hours, I think..."

"Do you think we stayed here in Evanston, or went into Chicago?"

"I think we went to Chicago."

"Do you remember where we parked?"

"In that place that goes round and round."

"Yes, the parking garage."

"Yes."

"It's a parking garage we've been to many times. It's across from what?"

"I don't know."

"It's across from the hospital. We went into the hospital and went to a meeting. Do you remember anything about the meeting."

"You went to your place and I went to mine."

"And what did we do?"

"I don't know."

"We went to a focus group. For early onset Alzheimer's. I went with the caregivers and you went with the patients."

Quiet. Then, hands over face...

"I hate this."

Anyone for chicken?

She took out a package of frozen chicken breasts this morning and put them in the sink to thaw. But we ate dinner at Subway. So I ask her to cook the chicken breasts before they go bad, and we could eat them tomorrow. Next time I see her, she's sorting laundry. I ask her to cook the chicken. Next time I see her, she's rearranging the living room. I ask her to cook the chicken--the chicken in the sink. I go into the bathroom to rinse away the itchy little hairs left over from my haircut today. She knocks on the door and says, "I don't know what I'm supposed to wash." I say, "Don't wash anything, cook the chicken. Cut it into little pieces, put them in the frying pan, cook it, put them in the refrigerator, we'll eat them tomorrow." When I finish washing my head, I go into the kitchen to find her folding a large empty frozen food package that I recognize as Adam's chicken nuggets. The frying pan is sizzling with frozen breaded chunks of chicken that are meant to be heat-and-serve. I look at the raw chicken breasts in the sink. "What," she says, "isn't this what you wanted me to do?" I tell her I wanted her to cook the raw chicken in the sink. "I thought you wanted me to cook ALL the chicken," she says.

Why am I in the basement?

Adam played with the hose Monday night and came in with wet shoes. On Tuesday morning, getting him dressed, I asked May if his shoes were dry. She checked and reported that they were pretty wet. I told her to put them in the dryer for a few minutes. She went to the basement, stayed gone for a few minutes, and then came back carrying the shoes. "These are really wet," she said. "He can't wear these."

"Exactly," I said, "that's why you took them to the basement--to put them in the dryer." "Oh," she said, and went back to the basement.

A few minutes later, she was back. "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing in the basement," she told me. And then I remembered what I was dealing with. We forget, sometimes, how confusing a simple task can get. "Let's go take a look," I said.

In the basement, I found the dryer running. "What's in there?" I asked. "I don't know," she said. I opened the door and found white things spinning, still quite wet. They hadn't been in there long. "Where are Adam's shoes?" "I don't know."

I looked in the washing machine, and there were the shoes, on top of clean clothes that were still wet, apparently from yesterday's wash. "Take the clothes out of the dryer and put them in the washer," I said. She started removing the clothes from the washer. "No, don't do that. Don't take wet clothes out of the washer just to put other wet clothes into it." She said she didn't want to mix the two batches. So I closed the washer lid and piled the clothes from the dryer on top of it, took a few towels-waiting-to-be-washed from a pile on the floor, tossed them into the dryer with the shoes, and we were back on-task.

I haven't posted in a while. But I woke up this morning with those words: "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing in the basement." It seemed like I should write about it.