And her name is Natasha

Managing the care of someone with ALZ isn’t easy. This is especially true when the person you are dealing with could be difficult in their pre-ALZ life. And my mother could be that person.

Maybe this isn’t the same for everyone. Maybe your family member or friend became as gentle as a lamb after their ALZ diagnosis, but this is my story and my mother, so I’m here to tell you that it isn’t all sweetness and light. She’s even more paranoid than she was, and that’s going places.

Maybe this is an easier transition for me than it is for someone who has a loved one who never had a hint of paranoia pre-ALZ and was a trusting soul who never had a cynical thought in their head. This was not my mother. She always had more than a hint of paranoia and rarely trusted anyone. That sort of rock-bottom personality trait led to a good deal of cynicism concerning the behavior of her fellow humans, as you can imagine. Her only blind spot throughout any of this was my father, whom she would blindly trust, even though his decision making could be… flawed, shall we say. It’s not that she agreed with everything he said or did, she often argued or disagreed with him about his extended family – his brothers, especially – but that was an offshoot of her paranoia.

My mother was always, always, convinced that my father’s family didn’t like or respect her. She was convinced that they talked about her behind her back. That they didn’t care about her. That she wasn’t important to them. The irony is that she talked about them all the time behind their backs and she spent way too much time worrying about what they thought about her. She spent a lot of time worrying about what the neighbors thought and how she imagined she was perceived by anyone outside of her immediate family.

But when success was achieved, and it was — all of her children are highly educated and reasonably successful in life — she never crowed about or made any real mention of our relative success to offset the perception she thought people had of her. The only exception to that might be my youngest sister who pursued a nursing degree later in life – she was 46 when she got her RN which isn’t the typical timeline. I think my mother was proud of her, she always respected medicine, but by that time she also was already forgetting things in the earlier stages of her ALZ. She couldn’t retain that information.

But she IS able to retain the paranoia that has dogged her her whole life. Except now it isn’t the extended family she’s paranoid about, and who would care if she was anyway? It’s not as if she’s ever going to see them again and if her paranoia is deflected outside of her immediate caretakers, it doesn’t feel so personal. But now, now, we are ALL against her. I, for example, am taking sides with my father against her.

As much as I have differences with my father, and those differences are legion, I do respect that he carries the major burden of caring for my mother and needs a break from her. I visit every Saturday and while I’m looking after her so that my father can escape for awhile, I don’t let her call him despite her immediate and multiple demands to call dad the minute he steps from the house. Therefore, I am against team mom and for team dad. Nothing could be further from the truth, but you can’t argue with a paranoid conviction. You just can’t.

So, I have concocted an evil twin sister. Her name is Natasha and she’s the one who denies my mother her heart’s desire. She’s the one who is stern and unyielding. It’s not the first time my evil twin has made an appearance in my life. Sometimes to save one’s sanity, like when one’s husband wants to buy an expensive car, watch, or other high-ticket item not easily absorbed by the household finances, the evil twin has to take over to deny or delay a particular purchase. She doesn’t always succeed, but she’s there to back me up. She has also been good experience for the present situation.

You can’t take these things personally, of course. Mom’s paranoia has always been a part of her personality and it is now ramped up to epic proportions. I knew this was a possibility, even a probability, but it’s still painful to be on the receiving end. I think even my evil twin is hurt by it and she has no feelings at all since she is completely heartless.

Mom wants to die. She says it again and again. She’s miserable in her sinkhole of depression and she doesn’t have the capacity to pull herself from it. I’m not sure she ever did, really. She suffered from depression her whole life and always struggled with keeping her head above water with it. Now she can’t even do that. She doesn’t have the tools for it. Her only focus in life, insomuch that she can focus, is my father. The sun has always risen and set around dad and now she feels he is betraying her. She thinks he wants her gone. She thinks, not without reason, that he always wants to get away from her. So she wants to die.

Dad isn’t one of the most patient people I’ve ever met. He has never done well sitting still or caretaking anyone. He’s happy to visit a sick friend, for example, but really take care of them? Not so much. He didn’t do any caretaking of us as children, which comes as no surprise considering his generation. He always had an impulse to be on the move and doing, not sitting still and reflecting on much.

Consequently caretaking mom is killing him and he’s not shy about saying so. What he doesn’t realize, or chooses not to realize, is that his attitude and behavior hurt mom. She cannot remember what she did or said 30 seconds earlier, or what someone said to her 30 seconds earlier, but, man, she retains emotions. And the emotions she retains are always the negative ones, not the positive. Always.

This is an ongoing battle with no one the winner. Dad refuses to get help from a support group with the attitude that it will just be a bitch session rather than sharing with others his frustration and learning from others how to cope. He refuses to educate himself on the disease so he can understand what’s going on in mom’s head and learn ways to manage her care which, at the end of the day, would make his life easier. I’ve long given up on offering any advice because he simply won’t heed it. It was leading to way too much stress and frustration for me and I already have enough of that without adding to it.

My evil twin can’t help me in this situation because even she doesn’t have the superpowers to break down walls. She can only make a protective shield. Maybe she isn’t so evil after all.