When are we going home?

Mom was never great at directions. Dad did the bulk of the driving for their 62 years of marriage. Mom did drive herself to work daily when I was a teen and older, and she knew how to navigate to their cabin about an hour away from home. I posted before about her decision to surrender her car keys in 2022. But this is a location issue of a different sort. She is often not sure where she is, and is concerned about what she has to do to prepare to "go home".

There are several common concerns she shares - one of the most frequent is that we are at the cabin and need to pack up to go home. She will ask me several times per day (especially into the evening) where her suitcases are, or whether she has time to do a load of laundry before we go home. In real life, the cabin has no laundry facilities. And we sold it more than four years ago to help to fund our bachelorette pad.

When I have driven somewhere on business she will sometimes think that she has been the one to go on a trip. A drive together to a local park will turn into a vacation at the beach in her brain. She was actually with us at the beach this past Summer, but was afraid to set foot on the sand, or even on the pool deck. And she has no recall of being there. 

The images in her head are vivid, and I'll admit that I feel badly when she asks me a direct question about it and I have to answer her honestly and correct her misperception. She tries to cover it, or make a sassy remark about her brain. I can tell that she knows her dementia is progressing, and that her humor is covering her frustration and fear.

Mom also has questions about how we came to live at this house. Almost every time she asks she is startled to learn that it has been several years since we moved here. I have our "bachelorette pad" origin story down pat by now, from countless recitations of it. She doesn't recall where she lived just before here, either. She does remember the house where we kids grew up (18 years there), and the bigger "executive house" she and Dad moved to when I was in college. They spent 38 years there. Their downsized condo life was a short 7-1/2 years long, and it readily disappears into the depths of her mind.

One day I was trying to help Mom reconstruct her residential history, so I grabbed a big piece of paper and drew a timeline, with mini sketches of each respective house as a frame of reference. Then I filled in significant events that happened in each place. It shows here she lived when each of us was born, graduated high school and college, and got married. It included markers for when her parents and then my Dad passed. It even included markers for when I got married, divorced, married again, adopted my kids, divorced again, and my own house moves along the way. We like to take it out from time to time, just like we look at old pictures of her various houses with Spring flowers, Summer greenery, Autumn color, and Winter snow.

Mom asked me yesterday whether there is anything to do to get her memory back, knowing the answer to her own question. As much as she frustrates me some days, I feel sad for her loss. And I will tell her where she is as gently as I can, fill in as many blanks as I can, as often as she asks me. She IS home - with me.