Last weekend I drove down to Big City to visit Mother. (I'm writing this on May 2. I visited her April 25-27.) It's starting to worry me, how much she is aging. (See by comparison this post, or this one, or this one.)
The ostensible purpose of the visit was to go through some of Father's old clothes, to see if I wanted any of his old shirts so that she could clear them out of the closet to make room. Father died almost eleven years ago, but it always took my parents a long time to get around to things. Well, we found something like two dozen shirts which both fit me and more or less matched my taste. (Brother and SIL had been there the day before, and had pulled out only two or three.) So I was able to clear a lot of space out of her closets, and it saved me the trouble of having to buy more shirts. That's not where the problem was.
First story
The first morning I was there, I woke up before she did and wanted to check my email. But my computer couldn't find her network. I looked around and saw that she had a new router. But unlike the old one, it did not have the network's name and password on a sticker. So I waited for her to get up. The after breakfast, I asked her about it.
"It looks like you got a new router."
"Oh yes, I did."
"What's the network ID and password? I want to check my email, and I can't connect."
"Isn't it on the router?"
"No, I checked." (But she went to check anyway, which was fine of course.)
"They never gave it to me."
"That's not possible. They have to have given it to you."
"Well they didn't! You know, Brother and SIL were here when they installed the router. Maybe the man gave it to them."
"What?"
"But then they would have given it to you."
"Well they didn't! I don't have it, and I never got it."
"That's crazy. You have devices that connect to it. All those devices must have been reprogrammed with the new password."
"You'll have to talk to Brother and SIL."
"OK, but they're not here. I can text them, I guess, but they might be busy."
"Well that's what you have to do."
So I texted Brother. I also poked around on Mother's desktop computer to see if I could find any place the new wifi password had been stored. Mother went to get her handwritten password book, and looked up the name of the service provider. There was no entry, and she showed me that to prove that she had never been given the password. I never heard back from Brother. Finally I paged through the rest of her password booklet. At the very end, under "Wi-Fi," was the new password for her new network. I tried it, and it worked.
So I texted Brother, "Never mind. She found it." But wow. How is it possible that she could have concocted this story that they never gave her the new password? Was it a confabulation? For that matter, is it true that Brother and SIL were the ones interacting with the guy from her Internet service? Or did she make up that part when she needed a way to explain why she "never got" the password?
Second story
For the last several visits, every time I have been down to see Mother she has mentioned that she wants to fill out a Power of Attorney form for Medical Decisions, naming me. She has also said (for example, here) that when Father died she was really unprepared, because she had been in hard denial about how sick he was. So when she brought the subject up yet again, and mentioned that she had been given blank forms by at least two different sources, I said, "Great. Go get one of them and we'll take a look at it."
"No, we can't do that right now. Besides, I'm pretty sure they require a witness, and we don't have a third party here who can act as a witness."
"OK, but let's just get the form and read it. That way we'll know for sure what the requirements are, so you can plan for them over the next days or weeks. Also if there are questions you haven't decided yet, reading the form will tell you what they are so you can think about them."
But no, she couldn't do that either, not right now. I forget why not. Finally she said, "Look, I'm so busy right now, and I'm so stressed, that I can't do this now. I have to write it on my list along with everything else so that I can prioritize all these things I have to do. For example, I also have a bunch of responsibilities to prepare an event for my professional society, and that has to be the top priority because the event is happening at the end of May!"
"Listen to yourself. Dealing with this form is probably a five-minute job, and you've just said you can't even think about it until the end of May. Is that right?" Of course in my mind I was thinking about this conversation with Wife.
"That's right! I've just got so much going on right now that I'm completely overwhelmed and I can't think about adding any more tasks."
At the word "overwhelmed" I walked around the table and gave her a silent hug for a couple of minutes. She sure sounded overwhelmed. But I don't think it's because she is "so busy" in any normal sense of that phrase. What I think is happening is that her capacity to handle tasks of any description—her capacity to do work of any kind—is severely impaired, so that comparatively minor jobs have become huge and baffling. This development may in fact be related to the low-grade cognitive impairment we saw in the First Story above. I wonder if it is time for her to stop working, or how she would take the suggestion?
I probably need to discuss this with Brother. I really don't want to broach the subject.
Before I sat down to write this story, I assumed that the problem was that she didn't want to think about dying, and that she was therefore putting off any actions or decisions related to her own mortality. That is to say, she's definitely putting those things off. But I just now hit on the idea that it might be a cognitive problem, that it is too big a job for her to wrap her mind around. She has been so smart and so sharp for so long that this is a brand-new idea for me.
Other insights
I am starting to see that some of my long-term difficulty in making decisions is something I share with Mother. A few months ago I wrote this post, where I connected that difficulty to Father's unspoken and unacknowledged habit of punishing anyone who expressed a strong preference. But I also see my own passivity in Mother. If there is any risk of any question being the least bit controversial, she is willing to go along with pretty much any opinion so long as it leaves everyone else satisfied and no-one angry. (See, for example, here.) I wonder if she worries that naming me as her Attorney for Medical Decisions will anger Brother? Of course she can name him as an alternate, and has already said that she would.
I've been mulling this post for a week, without making any written notes. At this point I can't tell if I've covered everything or not. And even after I started writing it, I let myself get derailed for hours in the middle. So Mother's not the only one putting things off because they are unpleasant.
Oh well. I'll click "Publish" and then later if I think of more I can write another post. But I'm not happy about any of this, and to say that it leaves me "thoughtful" (as I have said sometimes in the past) is to put it way too gently.
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