Faith Works: A slightly different take on Mother's Day, when your mom has dementia

My mother doesn’t know who I am.

She lives with my sister, and Mom doesn’t know her all the time either; she will argue with her about whether my sister is coming home for dinner.

One of my brothers is there most weekdays, helping care for her, and she doesn’t know him but calls him “a friend of the family.” True enough, as far as that goes.

We suspect there’s in her current phase of dementia a sort of face blindness: Mom has told people after I’ve left, even the next day, that her son Jeff came to visit, even when during that visit she’d ask me if my parents lived nearby. She has trouble coming up with exactly who people are when she is looking at them but often later has a recollection of their identity.

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The term dementia is an awkward fit, just because of assumptions and stereotypes that go with the word. Mom can talk to you in coherent, complete sentences (though the silences are getting longer at times), and she’s more mobile in some ways than she was for years, before she moved in with my sister. If you don’t know the backstory, you could sit and talk to her for a goodly stretch and not know her mind is seriously impaired.

But both of her parents have been gone over 40 years, yet she talks about them coming over to stay for the night or going to teach for her father, who was a school superintendent almost up to his death in 1970. In her mind these days, she taught until last year (she retired in 1999) and drove until a few weeks ago (we don’t think she’d driven herself anywhere since 2017, definitely not since we brought her to Indiana in 2020).

Sometimes when I describe the current situation, people will say, “Oh, my, that’s terrible; that’s just the worst thing.” And I don’t want to argue exactly with such sympathy. It’s odd, to say the very least.

Yet there’s a fair amount to be thankful for, and I don’t believe I’m just putting a good face on things. Mom was never a big fan of new experiences in the years we knew her (I’ll leave a window open from before our childhoods), and if we took her to a restaurant or location she didn’t like, she’d insist on leaving fairly quickly. She preferred what she liked, the more familiar the better.

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In this current incarnation, she’s open to possibilities. Last summer I took her to a restaurant where my brother was performing, and we got there early to eat. It was a college town bar cum bistro, concrete floored and loud, with food served in baskets. The Mom I’ve known would have hated it. The Mom I have now? She was fascinated by it and pleased at her food when it arrived. She ate about 3 micrograms of it, but that’s par for the course. I recall many a meal where she ate the whole thing, grimly condemning the food, the service and the location; these days, she goes with my sister to outdoor performance venues and strange houses of friends of my sister, and she’s all in.

In general, she’s content. I might even use the word happy. And here’s the question: Would I rather my mother know who I am and be miserable or that she be happy but uncertain why I’m sitting with her watching the Cubs play? The latter is working out just fine.

My mother is happy, and that’s a blessing. May you find a blessing in your mother’s life worth holding onto this Mother’s Day.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; yes, he’s learned a great deal about memory care issues the last few years. Tell him how you mark family celebrations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Faith Works: Mother's Day when your mom struggles with dementia