I’m a little behind in my posts concerning my journey alongside momma and her traveling companion: Alzheimer’s. I wrote this a few weeks ago, so am posting today in hopes of helping interested friends and family catch up on how things are going.
I guess my sweet momma has been not-so-sweet in the evenings lately. When I arrived for a recent visit, two of her nurses were glad to see me, as they were discussing “what to do about Charlotte.” They shared with me that, around 8 pm, anxiety sets in and momma becomes a different person – extremely hard to handle, won’t sleep, wanders into other residents’ rooms, won’t stay seated in her wheelchair, gets down on the floor and plays with wires on her alarm mat, talks incessantly and loudly, and demands attention if she feels you’re not paying attention to her.
Cries of “Help me! Help me!” are common now. When help comes, she doesn’t have enough language to be able to articulate what she needs. The staff do their best to guess what she needs, but she sometimes aggressively resists those attempts to help her. She really needs help with all matters related to personal care and getting dressed, but often gets angry and combative when staff try to assist.
I have noticed hints of similar behavior when I am there for lunch. Staff will tell me she refused care in the morning and preferred to sleep over coming out for breakfast. I am usually able to get her up for lunch (we sometimes have to make it a double-team effort), and she’ll sometimes show up in her pajamas, but she will usually eat a hearty lunch (the caregivers put extra food on her plate knowing she won’t ask for more and that it may be her only meal that day).
Some abilities are pretty much gone for good; others seem intermittently absent. On any given day, she may not have a clue as to how to eat what is on her plate. By the following day, she may be eating with relish, including snitching from the plate of a nearby resident who wasn’t interested in their food. One particularly difficult day, mom ate her lunch, but needed coaching for each item on her plate. Some days there was no way she was going to take a shower; then there was the recent rare day when she was super cooperative and blessed her shower attendant with profuse thanks for helping her.
The staff has been busy trying to find the best routine for her. Sometimes it’s tweaking which medications she takes, other times it’s adjusting the timing of medications to see if that will help. The two-fold goal is to keep her as pain-free as possible and help her relax and get some sleep in the evenings without making her too groggy in the mornings.
As hard as all this is, I need my readers to know that I am concerned, but not anxious about this. In fact, my heart is overwhelmingly thankful for the good care she receives from some pretty amazing caregivers. God is at work, even in the hard times.
Not long ago, I spent time in the old testament book of Habakkuk in preparation for teaching from that book in Sunday School. Now, I know I’ve read that book before whenever I came upon it in a “Through the Bible in a year” reading plan checklist. I have probably breezed through its three chapters in this way a handful of times, but I don’t think I’ve ever spent much time pondering it; and I don’t think I have ever taught from it. This time I listened to it via my Bible app. Next, I read it. Then I listened to it again as I followed the words in my own copy of Scriptures – I always tend to pick up on more of the nuances of a passage when I use more than one sense. Finally, I read what Ray C. Stedman had to say about it in my favorite Bible commentary, Adventuring Through the Bible.
Habakkuk had some complaints for God. I found it comforting to realize that God listened to those complaints, and He answered. Habakkuk shared how hard it was for him to fathom why God allowed such bad things to happen in the world around him; it seemed that God did not care, that He was idly watching all the evil happening, that He was without mercy. The Lord didn’t chide Habakkuk for being a complainer; instead, He answered his complaints by assuring Habakkuk that He was working in the background on things which Habakkuk could not see or understand.
I identified with Habakkuk in his wondering what God is up to and wasn’t afraid to ask the “why” question. I look at what my mother is going through and I sometimes feel as though God is not answering my cries on her behalf…or her own cries for release. While it is not the same context or circumstance, I am reminded that Habakkuk’s God is my God too – and He works today in much the same way as He did when these words were penned: “If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come: it will not delay.”
I find myself in deep admiration of the prophet Habakkuk. He asks the questions I wish I was bold enough to ask. He then takes a good look at the perplexing things of life and compares them with what he knows about God, then applies his knowledge of those truths to the problem.
This process of walking alongside Momma on this final leg of her sojourn toward her heavenly home only seems slow to me. But I am confident that God is at work. He is “doing something in the background” of life. Based on what I already know of God, I know that whatever it is, it is good and His timing is perfect.
Barefoot Lily Lady 