My eighty-one-year-old mother is sure that the ninety-year-old man who lives next door wants to kill her with a gun. She has left fourteen voicemail messages in one hour where she explains that she must speak very softly so that he can’t hear her through the wall. Later, on the phone from a thousand miles away, I remind her that no one has a gun at the Oaks Assisted Living facility in Beaufort, South Carolina, and that residents do not have keys to other apartments.
Her Southern lilt pushes back. “I hate to tell you this, but you’re wrong. That man and his gang friends come into my apartment and steal things when I am sleeping in my bed.”
“Mom, you would hear them. Most of them use walkers!”
“They are very quiet. They wait until it’s very late and I am asleep.”
The nurse at the Oaks texts to tell me that Mom has confronted the man about stealing one of her new shoes. I follow-up with Mom.
“Why would anyone steal only one shoe?”
“I don’t know but he did.”
“But your shoe would not fit him.”
“Ashley. I’m telling you what happened in the middle of the night, and now he wants to kill me.”
I explain that she is hiding things and forgetting where she hid them—and then it seems like they were stolen because she cannot find them—like when she hid her pocketbook in the cat carrier in the back of the closet or when she wrapped her jewelry in hand towels and shoved them between the mattress and boxspring. I point out that her things have been found, that nothing has really disappeared for good. But her brain no longer functions rationally. It functions in Alzheimer’s delusions. She does not believe me.
I ask her to look down and tell me if she has both shoes on her feet.
“Well, yes but that doesn’t mean he didn’t steal one and then bring it back.”
She is sure he has come into her apartment in the wee hours of the morning. Except, according to the JubileeTV camera that I have installed on her television and that I can monitor from my phone here in Massachusetts, not one person has been in her apartment in the middle of the night or in the wee hours of the morning.
When I tell her this, she replies:
“Well that camera must be broken. That’s too bad.”
Every few days, she is convinced that her phone has been stolen.
Routinely, I say, “Please look down at your hand. What are you holding?”
“My phone of course. How else would we be talking?”
“Right! Yes! There’s your phone!”
She exhales loudly. “Thank God! I am so relieved. I wonder where it was?”
Last summer, before my mother moved into the Oaks she lived alone in her brown, cedar-shingled house overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway that meanders through the South Carolina sea islands. Her dear friends supported her with household tasks, medication organization, laundry, and meals. When I was down in July, we visited several assisted living facilities and each time we walked out the front door, my mother turned to me, glared, and muttered, “I will be dead before I live there.”
Once we had settled on the Oaks, the phone calls were relentless. Her voice was predictably dramatic; yet gut-wrenchingly desperate:
“Please do not make me go to that place. It is full of old people who are mute. I will go insane in that tiny apartment. I would rather break both of my legs and both of my feet than do this because then it would be over!”
I knew that “it would be over” meant she would be dead.
“No, it would not be over because then you would go to rehab with a bunch of people trying to stand up again. Then they would decide that you couldn’t be alone. You are forgetting to take your medicine and pay bills and your refrigerator is full of containers of leftovers, gallons of milk, and bunches of half-peeled brown bananas.”
“I drink milk every morning and eat half a banana. Then I make a scrambled egg and a piece of toast.”
“And every morning from Massachusetts I worry about the stove being left on by accident and then the house burning down.”
“Well, I wish I were in the Cheyenne Indian tribe because those children just naturally take in their elders.”
Daily she asked, “Why are you doing this to me?”
Daily, I said to her “I am not doing this to you; I am doing this for you.”
Daily she replied, “That sounds like something a therapist would say. Did a therapist tell you to say that?”
This is one of my mother’s favorite questions.
“No. I thought of it in my own brain,” I said.
“Well, maybe you should publish it,” she retorted.
My mother moved into the Oaks over Thanksgiving vacation. I arrived in Beaufort on Saturday and scheduled all of the hours of the days as intentionally as I would design a daily routine for a new school year. There were hours for deciding, packing, loading, unloading, unpacking, going to lunch, napping, packing, unpacking, going to supper. It took three days to make the apartment homey enough for my mother to be willing to walk in the door without growling that she wanted to blow it up or seething that I was leaving her in the gutter.
“What gutter?” I asked.
“This place! This hospital place with these comatose old people with the wheelchairs and sticks who can’t talk!”
I remained calm. Like a teacher in front of children.
“I will talk to the director and have her introduce you to some people who can talk.”
“Fine. Where is the black string with my key on it?”
“Your house key or the apartment key?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes searched the air.
“Your apartment key is right on the blue lanyard around your neck.
She raised her right hand with the gold dome ring and touched the blue lanyard.
“I need my key to my house. Where is my pocketbook? Where is my car key?”
“The car key is at the house. You decided not to drive—”
“I know that but I don’t want to lose the damn key. Is it at my real house?”
“Yes, on the dining room table.”
“My car is in good shape. There are two new back tires. We could sell it, but where’s the key?”
“The car key is at the house on the dining room table.” I repeated this like I had never before uttered the words.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I put it there this morning.”
Two days after Christmas when I was back in Beaufort, I was sitting on a folding chair in the Carteret Street Methodist Church Parish Hall shaking a tambourine and singing along to John Denver’s “Country Roads” while the words moved across a screen on the wall behind me.
Between songs, I sipped lemonade from a Dixie cup and looked around at the mostly elderly people sitting at the long tables arranged in the shape of a square and covered with many of the same eighteen-piece puzzles that I had in my kindergarten classroom. Some people held battery-operated stuffed cats that purred and flicked their tails, and a large man across from me played a tiny, table-top set of drums and cymbals with a red plastic spoon.
My mother sat beside me in a Christmas plaid button-down shirt and black pants, holding her own tambourine, and trying to keep up with the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah River. She was pleased that I was there with her at social club– she laughed at the man with the drums and smiled at the gentle leader named Lilla with the flowy dress who massaged her shoulders when she walked behind her. When we left, she got in the car and said, “I just love going there even though I wish they had pastrami sandwiches with Lay’s potato chips.”
Now it is June again, and my mother continues to call the group “Social Club” because that’s what I called it when I suggested that she try it last summer when she was still living in her own house and could scramble an egg but could not remember how to start the washing machine.
“Social Club” is really called the Alzheimer’s Association Social Day Program. I know that if I had told my mother this last summer that she would not have gone.
She would have said, “I do not belong there.”
Last Monday was the seventh day in a row that my mother called me about the man with the gun.
I tried again to reassure her. “Mom. You have a disease in your brain. It is called Alzheimer’s.”
“I have Alzheimer’s? Are you sure about that?”
“Yes. And I was reading that one of the awful symptoms of this disease is that things that are not really happening feel as if they are happening. It’s called delusional thinking. This is what is happening to you: your brain thinks that there is someone coming to steal your things or kill you, and so you feel very afraid. But really, that’s not happening. You may have had a dream that something bad happened, and your brain is not able to tell the difference between the dream and the reality.”
She took a breath. “I see. That’s very interesting. And you read this somewhere? Like in a medical journal?”
“Yes, in fact, in several medical journals.”
“Well that’s helpful to know. Thank you for telling me that. I will try to remember it, but you might have to tell me again.”
Twelve minutes later, she left this message:
“Hi Ash. It’s Mom. It’s a pitiful world. Please stay safe. Drive carefully please. Thank you for everything. I love you very much. Be careful with your life.”
Ashley Fogle is a kindergarten teacher in a public school in Western Massachusetts. She recently completed a low-residency MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This is her first published work. She lives in an old farmhouse with her two golden retrievers, Harvey and Hudson.