The relief of my conversation with Ants last night on the phone, and this afternoon in the nursing lodge, was like a silk scarf that you wrap around your neck with its beginning and end hems floating in the breeze. (Yeah, dreadfully twee but whatever!)
I asked him why he had finally stopped accusing me of having an affair and he said, “I just guessed it.”
Thanks so much for those who commented on sundowner post – no time to reply at the moment.
The other day a friend mentioned this so I googled it and am stunned because it explains what has begun to happen to Anthony every evening! Other terms used are ‘sundowning’, ‘sundowner’s syndrome’ and ‘sundowners syndrome’. Here is a link to one ‘take’ on this very real problem.
http://www.caring.com/articles/sundown-syndrome
Sundown syndrome is an offshoot of dementia and usually happens as the sun goes down and light turns to dark, but it can also happen at sunrise. Some theories suggest that it has something to do with the 24 hour ‘brain clock’ that responds to changes in light. Other than this it seems to be a bit of a mystery. A person with dementia may be calm during the day but become agitated in the evening, sometimes quite dramatically.
Symptoms can include things like agitation, restlessness, aggressiveness, increased confusion, hallucinations, paranoia and a whole gamut of ‘out-of-character’ behaviours. This is the best explanation I have found yet to explain the last few weeks of Anthony’s increasing bewilderment and misery in the evenings.
Sunset, for Anthony and many others, is not beautiful.
A friend had a fall today and, after hours of checking to see if she’d broken her hip (no, thank goodness), she was released from hospital and is staying with me tonight with two of her beautiful grandchildren who she was babysitting. She is in a lot of pain but is in bed now and I am hoping she will be okay in the morning.
I got the message to call her at the hospital from the staff at the nursing lodge this afternoon, just as I was pouring drinks for Anthony and me, so I had to rush off. How ironic that I wrote a post about contingencies earlier today.
No time to read blogs or reply to comments at the moment.
A contingency is an unexpected or unpredicted event. I am sure there are deeper philosophical definitions but that’s who/how I see it.
So you cannot plan for contingencies because they just happen. I am learning how to be ready for them, to deal with them and to stop trying to figure them out.
Dementia is place where contingencies flourish, watered by leaking brain cells and lit by twilight. These contingencies are not funny or exciting like coincidences; they are cruel and cleverly shocking.
Over the last two evenings my phone conversations with Anthony have been disturbing as I described in yesterday’s posts.
So, later this afternoon, I am going to go into the nursing lodge and face this evening’s inevitable contingency with Anthony. We will have a small red wine with each other, I will make sure he eats his dinner (which he apparently refused last night), I will hug him and reassure him and I will talk to the staff and get their perspectives.
But I have a confession to make; I don’t want to do this because lately (despite the excursion out to the farm the other day), it is becoming an unpleasant experience for both of us. He makes accusations, begs to come home and sometimes rebuffs me – or else he clings to me, making us both weep when I leave to go home without him.
There must be a way of making this better – there must be. So many of my ideas have failed and, with each contingency, I have to rethink things again, over and over again, which is silly really because nobody can plan, organize, predict or be ready for a contingency.
And it seems self-indulgent to blog about a single situation when a hurricane had just devastated and killed so many, when millions are affected by ongoing wars, when children are being hurt, animals abandoned, forests dessimated – almost too overhwhelming to comprehend from my tiny little space of the here and now.
Once upon a time, Ants and I would have talked about these contingencies with gusto and passion because they were not our contingencies and we could philosophize from our coccoon of safeness.
Now we flutter, like moths with missing wings.
As a two-year-old, Ming gave much more of his affection to me than he did to Anthony. So, for awhile it seemed like I was the privileged parent. Sometimes I even worried (although somewhat smugly!) that Anthony might become jealous of the multiple kisses I received from Ming, compared to his own daily ration of one, maybe two.
But it wasn’t Anthony who became jealous; it was me! Why? Because, as Ming approached the age of three and began to acquire more and more words, I remained fixed in his vocabulary as ‘Mummy,’ whereas ‘Daddy’ became ‘Andony’.
My envy was made worse by Ming’s clear reasoning when I told him, rather shyly, that he could call me ‘Julie’ if he wanted to.
“But you’re just Mummy, Mummy – NOT Julie,” he said very definitely. He looked at me quizzically, obviously wondering if I understood or not.
“So how come you call Daddy ‘Anthony’?” I asked, hesitantly.
“Coz Andony is my bestest fren,” Ming said. Again, the slightly ironic frown.
I’m ashamed to say that my secret jealousy of the mateship between Anthony and Ming worsened over the ensuing weeks. Then, just as suddenly, it dissipated when one evening the brightness of their relationship clarified itself and I understood.
Ming was sitting on Anthony’s knee, and they were watching cartoons. I joined them, sitting across the room, and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ming deposit a series of soft kisses onto Anthony’s cheeks, then stroke his head with delicate, though bongo-style, pats.
It had been ages (a couple of days, I think!) since Ming had given me that sort of affection and I felt a mixture of yearning and bright, fluorescent, green envy.
I turned and caught Anthony’s eye. Ming saw the look and, perhaps thinking that I, too, wanted some attention, he tumbled off Anthony’s lap and toddled over to me. Well, it’s about time, I thought to myself.
“Mummy,” he whispered, climbing onto my knee, “I can ownee give you one kiss.”
“Why is that?” I exclaimed – a bit too forcefully perhaps.
“Because!” Ming said, alarmed at my tone but still with that wise-owl look on his face, “Andony is my bewful, bewful son.”
He kissed me benevolently once on the cheek, then hopped down and toddled back to Anthony’s lap, calling back to me over his shoulder, “You’ll be awight, Mummy, you’re a vewy big girl now.”
The day Ming was born
The three of us
The thing is that Ming has no recollection of these days. He only vaguely remembers running from one side of the room pictured above and flying into Anthony’s lap – constantly! He now calls Anthony ‘Dad’. He was glad not be home this morning for the excursion event.
For awhile I wrestled with myself about whether to force Ming to come with me to visit Ants more often but, as a friend recently pointed out to me, not many 18-year-olds want to spend time with their parents anyway so it’s not such a big deal. So I don’t push Ming anymore and I certainly don’t make him feel guilty about his disengagement from Anthony, and, fortunately, Anthony is content to see Ming occasionally or else speak on the phone.
So the ‘Andony’ days are well and truly over and that is okay because it has to be okay.
This morning, the nursing lodge bus came out at 10am with ‘the men’s group’. It was a great success!
Staff, residents and volunteers
Morning tea
Godfrey’s gang did their contortionist act but were outshone by an impromptu perfomance by the turkeys
Anthony and me
It is happening more and more often now – this evening phonecall from Anthony to tell me he is lost and asking me when I am coming to find him and bring him home.
Obviously it isn’t Ants who rings me because he has forgotten how so I usually speak to him and then to the nurse looking after him and then to him again.
It always ends up okay for him because I manage to reassure him and then the nurse reassures me too.
Usually I am okay because I know now that Ants’ evening confusion is pretty regular, and the staff are wonderful to ring me on his behalf.
But tonight, after reassuring Ants that I would see him tomorrow and him saying, “Okay, my beautiful girl”, I hung the phone up and my knees buckled.
I got up and went outside to feed the birds and they surrounded me while I threw bread, distributed wheat, and sobbed for my lost husband.
Peer pressure is a funny thing. No matter how much you resist it, you end up succumbing. Even when you’re only three and a half years old.
It wasn’t long before Ming’s fourth birthday that he began to realize that it wasn’t just Grandma who disapproved of his dummy (his “tuntun”).
The dummy situation changed rather dramatically for Ming when one of his playgroup friends Dillan came for a playover (Ming’s first ever). As soon as Dillan saw Ming pop the dummy into his mouth, he shrieked with laughter and yelled, “Ming is just a baby, Ming is just a baby,” in that singsong, horrible way children-teasing-other-children do with such sadistic delight.
Ming immediately spat the dummy out, unpinned it and dropped it, before throwing himself at Dillan and wrestling him to the ground. Then, when Dillan started crying, Ming mimicked him by yelling, “Dillan’s just a baby” over and over again, furiously.
I was a bit shocked at the sudden violence of the confrontation and it took a lot of chocolate cake and lemonade to pacify the two little macho machines.
But it marked a turning point for Ming. He knew now that it wasn’t only Grandma who thought the dummy was silly. Dillan’s words had sunk in and now Ming was actually embarrassed about his tuntun – embarrassment being another new experience.
Anthony and I had never worried about the dummy phase; we knew it wouldn’t last forever anyway. But after his altercation with Dillan, Ming started trying to kick the habit by himself. “Oany lemmee have it when I go to bed,” he’d say, sternly, putting it under his pillow.
His self-discipline amazed us. Only once over the ensuing weeks did Ming succumb to a day-time suck, and that was after he had a nasty fall and grazed his knee. But he still depended on that dummy at night-time.
Then, one afternoon, it wasn’t there and we couldn’t find it anywhere (I discovered it later inside the pillow case). Panic stations! I rushed up to the local shop and there was just one left – a pink one. My friend, Anna served me and asked who the dummy was for.
“Umm, we have visitors with a new baby,” I lied, guiltily.
“Okay,” she said, hearing the urgency in my voice.
I got home and Ming took the new dummy out of its packaging and stuck it straight into his mouth, only removing it briefly to murmur sleepily, “You are the bestest mummy in the whole wide world.”
And a month later he was over it. Just like that, he forgot about the tuntun. But I’ve kept that last dummy as a reminder of my great big beautiful baby.
Ming without dummy
I bumped into Anna the other day and told her the truth about this and she couldn’t stop laughing!
jmgoyder 