There But Not There

Episode # 88

There are times when mama just seems to be staring out into
space. There are times when mama doesn’t look at you but she looks through you.
She doesn’t realize there’s anything going on around her.

Over the Fourth of July weekend mamas great-granddaughter
come to see her. Not mama seem to be fixated on the granddaughter but I’m not
sure whether she realized it was her granddaughter or if she just realized that
somebody different was in the house.

Mama was not afraid of the granddaughter because she did
allow the granddaughter to feed her some food, she did talk to the
granddaughter, she did hold the granddaughter’s hand. Which I believe told us
that mama was not afraid of the granddaughter.

Mama was never one for the fireworks even before she got
dementia now she would take us kids to see the fireworks are let us kids have
fireworks at the house for the Fourth of July especially sparklers but that was
back before the government said you couldn’t have a said the fireworks were
dangerous. So mama didn’t even acknowledge the fact that the fireworks were on
the TV this year the didn’t seem too upset her at all she didn’t react to them
at all and didn’t seem to anyway.

When mama first got her dementia I would always tell her that
I love her I still do that today but I used to get on I love you too or a me
too however I am no longer getting tighter those all I’m getting now is oh
okay. There are times when I don’t even get that all I get is the blank stare.

I understand that this dementia will eventually take
everything away from mama. I’m wondering if this blank stare into space is part
of the dementia taking everything away from mama. It’s a stare of almost
looking through you instead of at you.

When mama broke her hip the insurance company sent in some
therapist in nurses and stuff and one of the therapists worked with mom’s legs
and showed Stephanie and I how to do some exercises with mom’s legs and mama
reacts to those exercises especially the lake that has the broken hip. Now I
don’t think the exercises are actually hurting the hip however I do believe
that they are making mama a little more uncomfortable because of mama’s
reaction.

I do believe that the blank stares or the stare into space is
happening a little more frequent it last a little longer and it takes a little
bit more to get a reaction out of mama than normal. However fortunately it
doesn’t seem to last very long once we start moving mama around a little bed
once we start talking to mom once we start Robin mama’s back mama comes to her
self for lack of a better description.