For people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, routines are very useful. Breaking the routine can cause stress and confusion for the patient and the caretakers.
The holidays have been especially tough for my grandmother and the rest of the family. Christmas is a big change from the normal routine, from decorations around the house to braving the stores and wrapping the presents. For someone who doesn’t remember what time of year it is, thinking it’s summer and seeing a decorated tree can be a shock.
Looking back, I think Christmas 2006 was really the point when I became convinced that taking care of my grandmother was too much for me.
My mother took gift shopping duty but I was on gift wrap patrol. (I don’t mind, I like wrapping presents.) The three of us made a list of what presents were for what person and stored them all in the spare room.
That didn’t stop my grandmother from obsessing over them. At least once per day (and more frequently as we got closer and closer to Christmas) she would ask me to go over which presents were for which family members. Thinking it would help if I wrapped and labeled the gifts, I went ahead and prepared the packages.
It didn’t help. Even with tags on boxes, she still couldn’t keep track of which present went with which family member. She was in a panic that she might have forgotten someone. I took the list of presents and rewrote it (bigger) and hung it up in the back room. It still didn’t help.
By Christmas Eve, she was frantically looking for gift tags for the presents that were already wrapped and tagged. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so frustrating and upsetting: she would ask for the gift tags, and I would hand a sheet of them to her. She’d put it down and ask for the gift tags again. Again, I’d hand the sheet back to her. Over and over.
I was starting to lose my cool, and started to yell. “It’s all done. Everything is right here. The presents are already wrapped and tagged!” Stuff like that.
And then we had one of those moments of clarity. She burst into tears and said, “I’m losing it!” Something had clicked and she knew she wasn’t acting normally. Those moments of clarity really break my heart.