Rising to the Occasion
After a reading I did with the Alzheimer’s Association in Columbus, a woman in the audience told us the story of a friend of hers, not yet sixty, who suffers from dementia. It has progressed enough that she’s living in a nursing home, from which she rarely escapes. In fact, she doesn’t want to escape. She doesn’t want to go out and deal with the world outside.
Her friend visits her, hoping to keep her connected to life: to other people, to the world going on outside the home. But her friend, the Alzheimer’s patient, is perfectly clear: she doesn’t want to get dressed and go out on any kind of expedition. She wants to stay where she is. She’s comfortable there. She has given up, any of us might say. But it’s no surrender to her. She’s simply more at ease in the home with her routines, with the familiarity of it. She doesn’t want to be connected to the world.
As I had read that day from the book: “My father seems to have given up—but maybe that’s what he has wanted all along. And if he wants to give up, doesn’t he have the right to? …It’s true that his mind is going, but who’s to say how he should spend his days? Who’s to say he shouldn’t sit in a chair and do nothing? Who’s to say, even, that he ought to do things that will make him happy?
“Night falls and wind rattles the windows. I worry about my father, but I also think about something Joe said when he was here, that Alzheimer’s patients sometimes need to crash. They need to give up for a while, and stop rising to the occasion.”
That’s our expectation for seniors, the same as for children: we want them to keep rising to the occasion. But should we be forcing them to do this, when they clearly do not want to?
Tags: Add new tag, alzheimer's, caregiving, coercion, dementia, nursing homes
