[TIMELINE: DECEMBER 2020–FEBRUARY 2021]
The rest of December was no better. Peggy’s confusion really started to get ahold of her.
Conversations like this were typical:
Me: Where were you when you lost your mask?
Peggy: I was on my way up in the air.
Me: What do you mean?
Peggy: I didn’t mean that. I meant that I was in the living room.
Or this exchange, after she had lost the dinosaur mask that she really liked:
Me: What were you doing when you lost your mask?
Peggy: I had my mask on, and it was there, and then there were none.
Me: Have you looked in the closet for it?
Peggy: Where’s the closet?
I resisted the urge to snap, “three feet from your bed,” and told her calmly how to find the closet, which she was able to do, but there was no mask. So I just ordered her another one.
A lot of other developments also started to appear on my radar, none of them good.
First, Peggy started having trouble taking care of her two cats. She either overfed them, or didn’t feed them enough. She also wasn’t cleaning her apartment at all, although she was often going through the motions. In some cases, she was making more of a mess. For example, she would take the time to “sweep” the floor, but in reality she just moved dust and debris from one place to another. She was also starting to have trouble navigating her apartment, like when she couldn’t find the closet. It was all harbingers right now. Quiescence, but for how much longer?
Now that Covid lockdowns were over and I was allowed to spend time with my sister indoors, my therapist Katy encouraged me to visit Peggy more often. And I did, whenever I could.
January 2021 was the start of a difficult year. Looking back, I can see now that it marked the beginning of the end. Prior to that point, we could all kid ourselves that Peggy’s Alzheimer’s maybe wasn’t that bad. We were marking the progression of her disease in small, incremental changes. But the pace of those changes began speeding up, and her deficits were growing.
In mid-January Peggy began to obsess over her little black cat, Jezebel, her former biohazard kitty and her absolute favorite. For some reason, Peggy was positive that Jezebel was dying, and there was no way to convince her otherwise. In reality, Jezebel still had some chronic health issues, but they were all treatable, and were being managed. Her health was actually fine, more or less, for an older cat. In hindsight, though, I think I know what was driving her anxiety about this.
Recently, after Peggy confided again to me that sometimes she just “can’t do anything,” she also told me that she feared that one day she wouldn’t be able to take care of her cats at all. Of course that was true, but I saw no reason to tell her she was right and cause her to worry about the whole situation even more. Instead, I told her we’d have to see what happens if and when we got there, but for now she was doing a great job caring for them.
Around this time I brought back Liz—who had taken care of Peggy back when she was still living at home—and I also hired Liz’s niece Desiree. Again, I felt lucky to know this family that had so many wonderful professional caregivers! Peggy liked both women, and I was grateful to have them provide companionship for her. Peggy was taking part regularly in activities at her assisted living facility, which was great, but for keeping her truly busy and content, I thought more assistance was definitely better. (I’m a “more is better” kind of girl.)
And it all seemed to go well. My therapist Katy reminded me to just take things day by day, and she fully supported Liz and Desiree being back on board to help Peggy.
But February brought a new unpleasant situation: problems with Peggy’s iPhone usage. For as long as I could remember, my sister had always been glued to her phone; she was always calling, texting, and playing Words With Friends and other games. However, at this point, she could no longer remember when she had called me (or others). So she would keep calling—and calling, and calling, and calling. It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t remember, but it was hell for those of us receiving multiple calls a day, every day. Stressful, too!
By the end of the month, I was getting as many as 16 calls in a day from Peggy. After a while, I stopped picking up all of them. It was just too much. Even though I began feeling l like I was a horrible person, I just didn’t have time to be on the phone with her for so many hours! At least when I did pick up, I’d manage to always be cheerful, and I’d always act like this was the first time I’d heard from her that day, no matter how many times we had already spoken.
I tried to keep in mind that all of us on “Team Peggy” were her lifeline. My sister was trying her best to manage her life, couldn’t do it, and needed people she trusted in her corner. She often told me, “I’m trying!” She never elaborated much more beyond that same phrase, but I realized that was because she just didn’t have access to the vocabulary anymore to explain any further how she felt. She just didn’t have the words. I think she meant that she was trying to hold everything together—and obviously, it was getting increasingly difficult for her to do that.
At least I had my go-to secret weapon to help me cope: humor. I turned to Monty Python’s Flying Circus (yes, I’m old) quite a bit. In the sketch I watched most often, one of the Pythons becomes increasingly confused trying to pronounce the phrase “no time to lose” with the proper emphasis. Each time he ponders aloud how to say it, he stresses a different word—“NO time to lose,” “no TIME to lose,” “no time to LOSE,” the last of which then inspires a cutaway to a cartoon depiction of painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, set to French can-can music!
