2.
After a week or so Mom had settled in wonderfully. I went to visit her every day during my lunch hour as the home was only a ten-minute drive from my office. We were sitting in the garden on a beautiful spring day having the same conversation we had every day, but I did not mind as she was relaxed and had already started putting on some weight. She seemed content, but suddenly she deviated from our usual conversation.
‘There’s that man,’ she said as she pointed to a janitor walking through the garden.
‘What about him?’ I asked curiously.
‘He tried to rape me last night. I gave him such a punch and fought him off. I’m full of bruises now, and my wrists are sore from when he held me.’
‘What! Did you tell someone?’
‘No, I can’t tell anyone. If I do, they will make my life hell here. They will all gang up on me.’
‘Who is “they”?’
She pointed to the nursing staff that were mingling about the garden having their lunch. ‘Them, they're all in cahoots. They all want to get me.’
‘Get you for what?’ I was so flabbergasted and not exactly sure whether to believe her or not.
‘Oh, they're just evil people. They go around hurting everyone.’
The hair on my arms stood up. I had seen documentaries and headlines in the news about how old people had got treated in some homes and how it had been caught on camera. I shivered at the thought that it might be happening here. The notion was too horrifying to grasp.
‘Where are the bruises, Mom?’ I asked gently, trying to stay calm.
I picked up her arms and turned them over looking for the bruises she supposedly had. As I held her wrists I tightened my grip on them, if she had been hurt as she claimed she had been, it would hurt her. Nothing! I wondered what I should do about it. What if something had happened and her mind was not playing tricks on her? I watched her face as she focused on the nursing staff, she had a distrustful glare in her eyes, and it made up my mind for me. I would speak to the manager before I left. After relaying the story to the manager, I was assured it was a common occurrence for an Alzheimer's patient to conjure up stories such as this. They could have seen a movie way back in their past that had similar events in it and to them, now in the present time; it became a reality. Still, she was going to conduct an investigation to appease my concerns.
The following day we sat inside the communal lounge with the other residents and when I asked Mom if her wrists were still sore and if she had found any more bruising she was cross.
‘What are you talking about? I haven’t hurt myself. Who said I hurt myself?’
Well really now! I sighed.
I brought a photo of her wedding day and put it up on the wall above her bed. It stood alongside photos of her three children and a couple of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I also brought all Mom’s photo albums too. They were full of fantastic black and white photos depicting a past full of memories and a time when her life was as clear as daylight.
We sat on her bed after lunch and looked through one of the albums. She named the faces in the photos and sometimes even told me the story behind the photo – who the person in it was, where they had lived and what they had done with their life. Sometimes she even told me tales of the lives behind the faces, like who was dating who or that the woman in the picture had been dating a fellow but had been in love with another man. She went on and on, reliving her life in all those photos as if her memory worked perfectly. We came across a photo lying loosely in the album of her latest great-grandchild, and she was unable to put a name to the face. She had seen him the past weekend and yet it escaped her memory. She grew tired, and I left to go back to the office, wondering how the mind could remember so clearly a life so far back and yet yesterday’s news had gone.