Inside the Dementia Epidemic: A Daughter's Memoir by Martha Stettinius Page B

full. As in most cities, we have a shortage of doctors trained specifically to work with the elderly. Dr. Claiborne is not a geriatrician, but she listens patiently to Mom, looks her in the eye over her bifocals, touches her arm, and laughs with her.
    A nother day Mom tells me she has a new “best friend,” another student from the college, a young woman from Egypt with whom she has shared bits of her life story as well as the name of her favorite shampoo. I feel a bit jealous of their conversations, as I did with Lydia. Mom tells me that the students who come over and lead activities, polish the residents’ nails, or just sit and talk are “one of the two good things about living in that place.” The other good thing is the friends she’s made. She can’t remember their names but she clearly enjoys their company. She calls one friend “the woman with the white hair.” She’s started to hang out with this friend and others at night to watch old movies on the big-screen TV in the main living room.
    I feel unsettled when she tells me that she’s reading less at night because “I have to watch these movies.” How long will it be, I wonder, before she spends all of her days, as so many of the other residents do, in front of the TV?
    A fter lunch, walking with me to the car, she turns to me with a smile and says, “Thank you for the repast, my dear. That’s the right word, isn’t it?” I agree that it is and we laugh. We both enjoy finding just the right word. I have been told that I speak as if I’m composing a short story in my head. I’m sure that comes from all the years of listening to my mother read to me as a child. When I speak or write I can hear my mother’s voice, her cadence.
    O ften when we drive back to Greenway my mother says, “Oh, do I have to go back to that place ?” Sometimes she calls it a hospital and the residents “patients.” Sometimes she talks about the “children,” and how poorly they’re doing in class. I correct her and tell her that she’s a resident, not a patient, that it’s an assisted living place, not a school, but perhaps I shouldn’t—she’s right, in a way: It is more of an institution than a home.

A Fall

    O ne week there’s an art exhibit in the Greenway auditorium of photographs of women with breast cancer, some of them naked from the waist up. Mom strolls beside me, glancing at the photos with a mild expression as if she feels no personal connection. I stop myself from asking her if she remembers having cancer. If she doesn’t remember, I don’t want to know. That would be yet another sign that she’s losing big chunks of her long-term memory, that her dementia is more serious than I want to admit.
    A few days later, I take a day off from work as one of my two annually allotted personal days to drive Mom two hours to her preferred breast clinic for her annual mammogram. Mom’s checkup is uneventful, but we have a bit of a mishap before the appointment. We arrive two hours before the appointment and decide to go out to an early lunch. Since our chosen restaurant won’t open for another half hour, we walk next door in the strip mall to a clothing store, where we pass the time flipping through racks ofblouses and pants. I don’t yet realize that I need to walk next to Mom every second. We separate for a few moments, browsing in different aisles.
    I lose sight of her, then hear her groan. I turn a corner in the middle of the store and see that she’s fallen down a short flight of stairs. She lies crumpled on her side, her arms and legs flat and limp against the floor. One young clerk rushes over to help. Mom laughs it off and lets us pull her upright. She seems to be fine, no bruises, no cuts, no broken bones.
    A few hours later, her left foot starts to hurt. When we get back to town she can no longer walk. I take her to the convenient care center where an X-ray shows she has a tiny fracture in her foot. As with her rib fracture when she fell out of