Car Jackings and Drug Deals

Watching a parent tumble down the irrational and senseless mountainside of dementia is one of life's most unfair and agonizing plot twists that any adult child can experience. It's often unexpected and can unfold so fast that you sometimes find yourself sinking into a pity party of a different kind of orphan.

Earlier today my cousin and I were casually texting each other about younger dreams and planned vocations that either didn't pan out or life simply surprised us by leading us down a different path. I reminded her that she was still using skills learned in nursing school but it was her lucky family who got to reap the benefits even if an ER full of patients had not.

That ultimately led me to thinking about my criminal psychology degree and the few short years I used that skill set before marriage and full-time motherhood pushed it aside. There was a day once upon a time when I spent my energy chasing felons who had absconded supervision, staking out a few drug deals and trying desperately although sometimes unsuccessfully to rehabilitate car thieves. All of those scenarios evidently still exist in my world except the perpetrator these days is my dear little mother, Nancy.

Known in her assisted living facility as the sweet little retired school teacher, Miss Nancy,

who only gets agitated when she can't find her fire engine red lipstick, my mother is living out her innermost Bonnie and Clyde almost weekly. Over the past 10 or so months, Covid lockdowns and isolation have kicked her dementia into supersonic gear and while these beginning signs used to throw me into a tizzy, causing me to argue pointlessly with her that she was crazy and needed to return to the saner side of thinking, recently I have grown more reticent and learned the calmer art of the repetitive reassurance.

"No Mom, Dad has been gone for almost 14 years," and "You do live here and have for over 2 years," or "Mom, you can't call your parents because they are no longer in the phonebook." Never mind that the "book of numbers" as she has referred to it, is pretty much an extinct dinosaur anyway.

So when I got the first call that Mom could no longer manage her medications independently, it was a bit of a shocker to learn that she had gone up and down her hallway trying to sell her meds to her neighbors. Imagine that! The woman who preached endlessly about me not smoking a cigarette, legal or not, had turned into the local pill pusher extraordinaire.

After that kind of news, you'd think you would be prepared for anything else to come. Not exactly. Over time she would make a break for freedom, bag packed, cane over arm and headed out the door for home. Or back to college. Or waiting on the curb for her parents to come and pickup her laundry along with her. Little demure, red lipped retired school teacher even dipped her unsteady toes in the art of car jacking one afternoon. Convinced it was my dad's car, she tugged on the door handle to no avail. Luckily, she was persistent enough to not give up until someone noticed she was close to setting off the car alarm. I can only be eternally grateful for people living in safe and rural Virginia still believing in taking their keys and locking the doors upon exiting.

While the staff has been on top of her antics pretty quickly and also have been wonderfully consoling when they have had to report her offenses to the authorities, namely me her POA, it does give me some solace to know that she happily returns back to the safety of her assisted living spaces and is just as content working on a crossword puzzle as she is plotting her next exit. But no matter how many times she has tried to make a break for it, it always brings a tear or two when they describe her bag that she packed to accompany her on the lam—nothing more than a Christmas gift bag that we had brought a few goodies and a new calendar in, stuffed with her mail that I can only assume is some old Southern Living invoice that I long ago paid online, her well worn slippers and several pairs of socks. The essentials that every girl needs when waiting for her parents to pick her up from school.

And while I consistently have tried to find the humor in all of this, the days are coming when I know that she will look at me and ask who I am. It's already begun to happen actually. Through her window last week when I visited from outside, she turned a framed picture around to show me the 50th anniversary pose of both her and my dad. She wanted to know who the man was. I reminded her that he was my dad. She looked at me puzzled and simply said, "I was never married to HIM!" The way she announced it made me think that maybe there was some proof of a former wild child that my grandparents were nervous for her to date. I suppose if she's waiting to be picked up and have her laundry done by her dear old mother, it would stand to reason that she wasn't married to him. Yet.

And so as the days unfold, I will keep a steady watch for the rest of the "yet's". She hasn't been moved into the locked down safety of Memory Care even though I know it's inevitable. Yet. She hasn't forgotten her name or even mine. Yet. She hasn't finally ridden off into that glorious and all healing cloud to join my dad and her parents. Yet. And yet, I still have opportunities to cherish the hello waves outside her window as she greets me and Kailua on our daily runs, showing me artwork or a card she received from someone months ago and yet has shown me 10 times in the first 5 minutes I've been standing there. Yet, I am not sure I’ll ever grow accustomed to the blank stares that often meet mine through that pane of glass that this pandemic has now rendered normal time spent with my mom.

Yep, my momma the drug dealing, car-jacking Houdini. Life makes not much sense these days. Not to her. And quite often, not even to me.