“Oh yeah, every time that dad forgets mom is dead, we head to the cemetery so he can see her gravestone.”
WHAT. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard some version of this awful story. Stop taking people with dementia to the cemetery. Seriously. I cringe every single time someone tells me about their “plan” to remind a loved one that their loved one is dead.
I also hear this a lot: “I keep reminding mom that her sister is dead, and sometimes she recalls it once I’ve said it.” That’s still not a good thing. Why are we trying to force people to remember that their loved ones have passed away?
If your loved one with dementia has lost track of their timeline, and forgotten that a loved one is dead, don’t remind them. What’s the point of reintroducing that kind of pain? Here’s the thing: they will forget again, and they will ask again. You’re never, ever, ever, going to “convince” them of something permanently.
Instead, do this:
“Dad, where do you think mom is?”
When he tells you the answer, repeat that answer to him and assert that it sounds correct. For example, if he says, “I think mom is at work,” say, “Yes, that sounds right, I think she must be at work.” If he says, “I think she passed away,” say, “Yes, she passed away.”
People like the answer that they gave you. Also, it takes you off the hook to “come up with something” that satisfies them. Then, twenty minutes later, when they ask where mom is, repeat what they originally told you.
I support this sentiment. Repeatedly reminding someone with faulty memory that a loved one has died isn’t a kindness, it’s a cruelty. They have to relieve the loss every time, even if they don’t remember the grief 15 minutes later.
In other words, don’t try to impose your timeline on them in order to make yourself feel better. Correcting an afflicted dementia patient will not cure them. They won’t magically return to your ‘real world’. No matter how much you might want them to.
It’s a kindness of old age, forgetting. Life can be very painful. Don’t be the one ripping off the bandage every single time.
I used to work as a companion in a nursing home where one of the patients was CONVINCED I was her sister, who’d died 40 years earlier. And every time one of the nurses said “that’s not Janet, Janet is dead, Alice, remember?” Alice would start sobbing.
So finally one day Alice did the whole “JANET IS HERE” and this nurse rather nastily went “Janet is dead” and before it could go any further I said “excuse me??? How dare you say something so horrible to my sister?”
The nurse was pissed, because I was “feeding Alice’s delusions.” Alice didn’t have delusions. Alice had Alzheimer’s.
But I made sure it went into Alice’s chart that she responded positively to being allowed to believe I was Janet. And from that point forward, only my specific patient referred to me as “Nina” in front of Alice—everyone else called me Janet, and when Alice said my name wasn’t Nina I just said “oh, it’s a nickname, that’s all.” It kept her calm and happy and not sobbing every time she saw me.
It costs zero dollars (and maybe a little bit of fast thinking) to not be an asshole to someone with Alzheimer’s or dementia. Be kind.
I wish I had heard this stuff when Grandma was still here.
“And remember: the sky is the limit! You can be anything you want to be!”
“Thank you. I want to be a secretary.”
That stopped them short. “What?”
“A secretary,” she repeated.
“But…” they trailed off, dumbfounded. “Why? You could be a CEO, a scientist, a law–”
“I don’t want to be a CEO,” she said. “I want to be a secretary.”
They scoffed. “You want to answer phones all day?”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“Schedule appointments?”
“I like organizing.”
“Be a second banana?”
An affirmative nod. “I’m skilled at helping.”
“I just don’t understand,” they said. “HOW could you be okay with all of this?!”
“I enjoy the work.”
“BUT YOU CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT TO BE!”
“I know.”
“Then WHY?!”
She shrugged.
“Because I want to be a secretary.”
Honestly though, this is very similar to my mom’s experience. She’s always been super bright, but has realized as she’s gotten older that intellectual pursuits just aren’t her jam. She dropped out of her PhD program to have kids, and although she has her master’s and was a pretty good school psychologist, she hated having to make huge decisions. She’s a church secretary now and loves it, and she’s GOOD at it; she’s letting her school psych certification permanently expire this year with zero regrets. If you can be anything you want, that includes the things we don’t tend to value as highly as a society. Not everybody is built for or wants the “respectable” careers.
My grandma did this to me, saying that i didn’t want to get stuck on the outside, making coffee and filing papers. The thing is, that’s exactly what I’ve always enjoyed the most, making and organizing things. That would be enough for me.
Nobody seems to realize that if you tell people they can be anything they want to be they will. And not everyone WANTS to be doctors or lawyers or CEOs or scientists. Sometimes, they just want to be a secretary.
it took me a LOT of therapy before i was able to shrug off the effects of the Gifted Child Upbringing enough to realize that what i really wanted to be was a house husband and Local Queerdad who writes novels sometimes. god, i’m so much happier now.
ain’t nothing wrong with an ordinary life. don’t let anybody tell you you have to be the top dog to be worth anything.
There is a really interesting blog called “Fluent Forever” that aids foreign language learners in tricks, tips and techniques to guide them to achieving fluency “quickly” and efficiently. One of the tricks is to learn these 625 vocab words in your target language, that way you have a basis to start delving into grammar with ease as you can understand a lot of vocab right off the bat. Plus this list of words are common across the world and will aid you in whatever language you are learning. Here is the list in thematic order :
I’m going to be making my own vocab lists using these words for my target languages of Korean, Mandarin Chinese, and Japanese. I’ll be posting the vocab by theme on my blog, so make sure to follow me https://asian-lang-stubyblr.tumblr.com if you are interesting in seeing those!
So useful! I really want to use this for Spanish now!
Happy 36th birthday, Sebastian Stan! (August 13, 1982)
I think for a long time, the idea of an “alpha male” was romanticized or defined in a certain way – often including violence – and it’s time for that to be re-examined. What is a man in 2018? What’s exciting about this time is that we all have an opportunity to listen, and to see where changes need to be made in the examples we want to put forward for younger people. I think it’s all about having the conversation. To me personally, masculinity is about offering protection, offering safety, holding space, communication, being vulnerable, never making the other feel wrong for how they feel, and now more importantly than ever, it is about listening and learning how to be of service.
There’s a lot of temptation to erase someone’s flaws when you lose them. You forget their bad habits because you miss the sound of their voice. Their mistakes, no matter how serious, start looking trivial because you just wish that you could hear about their day one more time.
This is one reason people wind up getting back with exes, but it’s worse when you lose someone forever. The idealized version of your late loved one will crystallize in your mind if you let it, perfect forever, because the dead don’t make new mistakes.
I wonder, then, what it’s like for Steve to lose Bucky and to get him back again. Because Steve mourned Bucky: Steve went numb with grief for him and burned every Hydra base he could find to the ground for him, and put that plane in the ocean. And then Steve came back, still missing him, and had those long years, out of place in a new century, to think of all the wonderful things he missed about Bucky Barnes.
There was the way that Bucky dragged him into dance halls, bright-eyed and grinning, and grief would soften how much Steve hated being there and hated watching Bucky dance with someone else, so only the soft-focus memory of Bucky’s head thrown back and his body moving to the rhythm remained.
There was the way that Bucky took care of him, and grief could wipe away how much Steve resented that sometimes, and leave only the affection in Bucky’s eyes.
Grief would leave Bucky’s touch and his voice and his sense of humor and wipe away the way he snapped his fingers too much listening to the radio and how he’d snort when he laughed too hard and how mad Steve got at Bucky for flirting with everyone.
And then Steve gets Bucky back — a real boy, broken, but alive and brave and healing. And once they’re finally together again, Bucky’s not perfect anymore, because he can’t be: no one is.
Steve visits the goat farm, and Bucky slurps the stew they share so loudly, and he hogs the covers and clings in his sleep, and his hair gets in Steve’s mouth all the time, during everything. He’s traumatized, obviously, and he’s trying so hard to atone for things that aren’t even his fault. He sings baby goats to sleep in a low, soothing voice. He sends Steve photos and texts that make him laugh from across the world, on the run. When they’re together, he’s in Steve’s arms, in Steve’s space, about ninety percent of the time. Bucky is alive and real and so much better than anything Steve could have remembered or imagined, because perfect isn’t your lost person. Ideal pales in the face of real.
ealdor 