Necessary Lies

The skin on her face is sagging away from the bones, thinned out and drooping as though it’s barely hanging on. Her hair is wispy and her eyes are slightly glazed over. I wonder how much of her is still in there. Despite this, she is still happy to talk to me, as she does now in the courtyard where we are sitting on an old park bench, enjoying the sun. We can chatter on happily for an hour or so, though little of what she says ever makes much sense. Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of who she may have once been. Something unbeknownst to anyone but her will trigger her memory, and, for a brief moment, she will seem to experience a return to lucidity. These are short lived moments though.

I have worked at this memory care facility for 3 years now; I know just about every resident personally, though they may not always remember me. Olivia was here already before I got the job. She’s 87, suffering from Alzheimer’s for about ten years now, though it’s hard to give an exact number. She has been at this facility for 6 years.

I know that she worked in some old department store, like a Macy’s, for most of her life. She has two adult children, and a brood of grandchildren too. Her husband passed when she was 75, and she began to go downhill after that. Long retired, alone in an empty house, children gone, tenuous connections with the neighbors and similarly aging friends on the edges of their lives.

Her children still visited, in the beginning thinking her to be competent and without much need for them. But with each visit they slowly began to reluctantly notice her deterioration. First something innocuous like a slip up on someone’s name. Then something a little more concerning, like a confusing argument about how long it’s been since the last visit, for she wouldn’t believe that they were there just last week. Eventually it grew more serious. They worried about her driving alone. Her body became more frail, shaky hands that perhaps should not have been handling boiling water or pulling baking sheets out of the oven.

So it was for her as it was for so many other residents. The children couldn’t take her in to their homes, for they had jobs, children of their own in school, and no one to help her throughout the day. It was the best decision for everyone, most of all her, a potential danger to herself as she deteriorated, to have her in a full time residential center where there would always be people available to take care of her throughout the day.

And we do take care of her. Her and all the other residents we have, who find companionship and new lives here. We facilitate activities and take them on trips, keep them engaged. I like to think they’re happy here, most of them. Olivia’s favorite activity is the dance lessons we have every couple of weeks. A guest instructor comes in and works with the more agile and physically adept residents, a group that Olivia is luckily still a member of. The music reinvigorates a little more life back into her, and she enthusiastically tries to learn the simple steps from the ever patient instructor, who always keeps a cheery voice as she repeats her instructions each time over and over just as happily.

Today there are no special visits but we had an arts and crafts activity before this. Most of them made a mess with the paints, but everyone had a good time. Olivia still has the remnants of purple and blue pigments on her fingers where the paint didn’t quite wash off fully. She is rubbing at them now, frowning with concentration and wrinkling her brow in apparent confusion as she struggles to fix this most pressing issue. I try to distract her by drawing her attention to the little sparrow hopping towards us.

“Look, Olivia, isn’t he a cute little guy?” I take one of her hands in mine and point to the tiny bird eyeing us warily from a couple feet away. She looks first to my hand, holding hers, and then to the bird. Muttering something indistinct, the hint of a smile appears on her face.

Seizing this new point of interest, I continue to hold her attention on this distraction as best I can. “Wow, wouldn’t it be neat if he jumped up here with us? I hope he doesn’t fly away,” I babble on while her eyes follow the bird happily.

And then, a rare cogent sentence from Olivia. Not even just one, but two.

“Where is Dakotah? Is she going to visit today?”

Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t better that their memories are gone, that they don’t have to miss their children, their spouses, their independence, their lives. Or, is it just that it makes it easier for me? Working with a child in an aging body is far less emotionally taxing than explaining to a diminished adult why they won’t be seeing their family today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day.

Dakotah, her oldest daughter, used to visit several times a week, bringing her own children with her usually too. But then she got a promotion at work, a much needed pay raise to support her three children better, but it necessitated a move to a satellite location the next town over. It’s an hour’s drive away, which is actually still pretty close for Olivia. Many of the other residents don’t have any family members within such easy reach. Still, the move has meant that Dakotah comes only once a week now. She comes on the weekends, usually Sundays after church. Today is Monday.

“Dakotah comes on Sundays now, Olivia. She was here yesterday. Remember the children brought you those drawings they made for you at school?”

This doesn’t seem to register with her. She looks at me confused, expecting me to say more, as though the sentences I’ve just uttered are a foreign language.

“Is she coming?”

When getting exasperated with the residents, sometimes you just have to tell them what they want to hear to help keep everything simple and harmonious. Their capacity for reasoning and memory is so impaired that sometimes there isn’t much more you can do. They can’t follow logical trains of thought, and sometimes their confusion will make them angry. I know it’s necessary, but every time I have to tell one of these lies I feel a surge of something like guilt, mixed with pity. Some day I could be there, with people far younger than me coaxing me with happy lies to keep me complacent.

“Yes, she should be here soon,” I tell Olivia. She smiles and diverts her attention back to rubbing the leftover paint from her fingers.