Every Day A New Adventure?

I was called from work by relatives in April when Ma had broken into her former home claiming my sister had sold it out from under her. We had just recently quit-claimed the house to my sister and Ma reported to me that her friends had told her that my sister had sold the house. Not totally unbelievable, but somewhat questionable. I pulled up to the house as the police arrived and I told them what was going on and they left. I then walked to the house as Ma scurried inside to claim her territory. The house was in total disarray as my sister had been cleaning out 20 years of accumulated junk so she could fix it up prior to moving in. Ma saw this as someone trying to steal her treasures (?). She kept stating that it was her house and she was staying. I reminded her of my friend, the lawyer, coming to the apartment to explain the quit claim process and what it meant, the house was no longer hers. She was furious and started picking up different items and claiming she could not live without them. We ended up taking some silk flowers as she wouldn't leave empty handed. I took her back to our apartment and the next day the flowers found their way to the garbage disposal. This was Ma's last real wandering event. She slowly was resigning herself to the idea that she was no longer going back to her old life.

I talked about this experience with my brother who reminded me that what Ma said was not always reliable. I have come to know he is right. It is a real consciousness shift to start questioning every statement someone makes as potentially false or delusional. The first part is to lose the strong desire within to believe everything that your parents say. In the words of Vinny Barbarino, "The woman is completely holy". How do you stop believing that this person, who has been a stalwart of integrity throughout her life, and is now weaving stories with elements of the truth twisted in some way to support an agenda that is delusional. How much do you believe and how much do you discount as horse-pucky. I didn't really comprehend that Ma wasn't capable of reporting the facts and I had a lifetime of trusting her judgement to overcome to get a handle on her current situation.

The second part to overcome is the natural inclination to take these apparent deceptions personally. I chased ghosts for several months coming up empty, confused more times than not, and angry as I had wasted valuable time investigating Ma's rants. Angry because I wanted to believe and I wasn't able, at the time, to look at some of these things in a comedic light. She was weaving partial truths from a lifetime of experience into currently delusional stories that had a basis in fact from 1972, or 1952, or yesterday. Her life and consciousness were like a stew after it is ready to serve. Are there potatoes? Yes! Did they go into the stew first or last? Does the order of the ingredients in the stew matter at all? Is it not a stew if the potatoes go in first or last? Ma's consciousness was in question, not the actual order of events or their truthfulness. This view makes things easier to digest. There is not a dishonest bone in her body, as always, just a delusional misinterpretation of factual information from disjointed places in time.

The third and most distressing part is to not discount everything she says as delusional. It is truly difficult not to just write her off as always delusional. When Ma wakes up in the night chasing cat's and bugs off of her bed and then reports that someone has tried to get in the apartment during the day when I am at work, I tend to immediately discount her experience as delusion. She locked me out of the apartment one day by putting her shoulder into the door and attaching the chain lock as I was entering, demanding that I identify myself. I became angry and spent five minutes getting her to undo the latch. She had moved swiftly and deliberately to put on the latch, but it took five minutes to remove it. She told me that someone had tried to get in and I remembered the cats and told her she was wrong. I later found out that my sister had tried to visit her but Ma's lack of hearing and fear kept her from letting her in. Ma thought she was someone to be afraid of, not someone coming to visit. It is truly heartbreaking to watch her be so incompetent. So heartbreaking to see that her reward for a lifetime of personal sacrifice is isolation, a prisoner of her own infirmities.