Wizard of Alz blog

It’s been a few weeks since my last post; At that time I said  we were on a waiting list for a memory care community for my LO; a spot did finally open up. She has been there almost 4 weeks now. The first 5 days were hellish, as you can probably imagine. After the initial 12 hour “honeymoon” she then started in: “get me out of here, this the looney bin; if you love me you’ll get me out of here; if you don’t love me, I want a divorce and then get me out of here” etc. etc. And then.….. she just settled in to a routine. It’s just amazing! She was there 5 days and thought she had been there 2 months! The staff had said that ‘s how it would proceed. I was a bit skeptical, but I’m bearing witness to the transition.

What I really wanted to talk about,  are the feelings surrounding this journey; It’s all over the board. Most of the time I can’t even tell you what I’m feeling, it’s just like a tornado with a lot of debris. But I’ve been trying to “process” my feelings, (don’t even know if that’s the appropriate word); “listen” to them; “feel” them; all the stuff I haven’t been good at. ( I want to do things differently;). I have been sitting with the idea; a vision came to me or a thought came to me; “what am I to learn through this journey?”. I’ve been reading some books about life lessons and stuff. The most obvious and blatant lesson for me, is learning “patience”. I was reminding myself, as I was reading something. I have written about how slow my LO has been walking, really slow. You think you know slow, well slow it down by another 10x! Needless to say, I would become impatient at times. To top it off, if I did get her to go out with me, she would then stop and talk to whomever, about whatever and just touch people’s lives in some way, which just annoyed me to no end because it’s already taking too long to do whatever we have to do, or I should say whatever I have to do. I was reading something, somewhere (can’t remember where or what), that said maybe we should go “off script” sometime, and we may touch someone’s life or they may touch ours. My LO used to do that a lot “before” (before Alzheimer’s) but now she’s doing it WAY more! It’s like her mind is now uncluttered with the minutiae of our lives that we think we have to get done and she’s focused on the here and now. (because that’s all she can keep in her mind). The here and now which is, you walk by someone and she says, “Hi cutie, how you doing today? ( and listening for the answer); How’s the puppy? How’s this or that? Make a joke or crack, make them smile, which seems to be her forte: to make people laugh and smile. And when I realized that, all this emotion (love??) came through……. I’m learning from her even as she’s struggling with this awful disease; I suppose I’m struggling with it too.

There’s always something to learn…..