My sister and I cleaned Mother's house this weekend. While she lives at the nursing home, we maintain her house the best we can. Besides the dusting and sweeping and washing the rugs and towels, we cleaned a closet we had not gone through before. It was mostly full of towels and sheets, but on the highest shelves we found linen place mats, dresser scarves and old table cloths from the 1950s all neatly starched and pressed. Tablecloths on the right, dresser scarves in the middle, place mats on the left.
On the lowest shelves we found the same kind of items: a large linen tablecloth and linen place mats and napkins. But these were messily folded, unironed, and stuffed into the shelf all together. We realized that the closet was a reflection of Mother's mind. As the dementia took hold, she could no longer keep her things crisp and neat. Like her mind, the linen was wrinkled and wadded up. She tried to place things as she always had, but as she would say, "It's all very confusing."
There is no clear light within the mists of dementia. Today as I visited Mother she was clinging to bits of herself. Trying to hold on. She repeated my name over and over. The chocolate candy I brought her ran in a long brown drool down the side of her mouth as she smiled. I washed her face. She repeated my name. Hanging on. Trying to stuff the contents of her life into a closet that has no organization and becomes "very confusing."
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