Clever girl

Ma Schmidt is getting wily about avoiding the anxiety medication. This afternoon I crushed one into a spoon of ice cream, and another into a spoon of jam. She rejected both of them. In fact, that's what triggered her fighting us so violently. 

Later in the early evening, Schmidt got her to take one pill by telling her it was heart medicine. Then he crushed two more into a little water and put it in a syringe that he squirted into her mouth. This is the protocol he uses to give medicine to his cats.

I think it works better on cats. He got the syringe squirted into her mouth, but then she just kept stock still. We tried to make her swallow some water, but she spilled the water and kept the liquid with the medicine under her tongue. A few minutes later, she spit out that too. Schmidt thinks that some of it may have been absorbed through the skin inside her mouth while it was sitting under her tongue, because she fell asleep not long after. But she is getting wily.

The thing is, at some level (perhaps not fully consciously) she can probably tell that we are being dishonest with her.

She says "Help me!" and we tell her she's safe. But she means "Don't let me die," and we mean "Of course you're going to die."

She is worried about what's coming, and we tell her not to worry. But she's trying to tell us that she's worried she might die, and what we mean is, "Don't worry, you can go ahead and die safely."

We give her anti-anxiety medication to calm her down, but we never tell her why. Or at any rate we never tell her the full truth about why—namely, that as she is slowly dying she is also becoming more irrational and less tethered to reality, and we want her to feel at peace partly for her own sake but especially for ours.

No wonder she thinks we are trying to kill her!

She asks for her husband, Pa Schmidt—or her mother—and we don't tell her where they are. Admittedly, Schmidt did tell his mother once that Pa had died seventeen years ago, and she got very upset. But that's why neither of us will tell her again. Yes, partly we don't want to inflict more emotional pain on her; but also we are managing our own emotional comfort, and it is simply more comfortable to lie to her or to deflect her questions. So that's what we do.

And she doesn't know WHY we are doing it, but I bet that at an emotional level she can absolutely tell that we are doing it! So why should she trust us?