I was visiting my mom in the long-term memory care facility. She has two friends who she sits with when she has her meals. They are lovely ladies. Every time I visit I am a new person to them and my mother introduces me as her daughter. Sometimes I can get the chatty one to talk about Boston in the 70s. She raised her kids in Hyde Park. She told me how it was hard when all the neighbors were fighting over the busing issue. But when I ask her about her four children and what they are doing now she struggles and can not remember. It is quite sad. The other day after leaving from a short visit as I drove back on the highway, it struck me that my mom and the other’s in her unit are ghosts. There are echos of who they were before dementia set in. They live in a space between life and death. In some ways many of them in my mom’s unit seem like they are just waiting to die. They are stuck in this bizarre space forced to wander in their minds with what memories are hardwired in their brain and unable to make new memories or learn new skills. For some the body is also no longer working and they need help eating and moving around. The sounds they make can be haunting at times.
Every time I visit with my mother she mentions my hair. This past visit I had a hat on covering my hair and my mother ran the program she has in her brain and said, “I like your hair”. It is not my mother commenting on my hair but rather the ghost of my mom who is saying she likes my hair. And that is the pain of dementia.
Because she is still very much alive there is no gathering or Shiva right now. But at the same time there is grief. And to be around her is to be haunted by the echos of who she was as a person.
