Elopement

I had a meeting with my mother’s care team yesterday.  It started with the administrator shaking his head and repeatedly muttering her name.  Thing is, up until the day before, I thought she was doing so much better that we would be having an entirely different conversation.  I was preparing to look into assisted living options for her.  I thought she might be moving towards more independence.

I was wrong.

She is stronger.  She can help lift herself from the bed to her wheelchair or from her chair onto the toilet seat or into a car seat.  She can raise her feet several inches off the floor, push the wheels of her chair with her skinny arms and knotty hands and easily maneuver the hallways.  She rolls with ease and speed.

But it turns out that this newfound ability is a mixed blessing.

It makes her harder to catch.

The gain in clarity my mother has made in the past month seems to dissolve as she tires and the daylight begins to disappear.  This relatively common behavior for individuals with dementia is called “sun-downing.”  My mother’s late day confusion has caused her to believe that she could leave the facility on her own and “catch a ride” downtown to her sister’s office.  And then her sister would give her a ride “home.”  There is more than one problem with this idea, but the primary flaw lies in the fact that her sister lives 125 miles away.  Yet, thinking it was a fine plan, she attempted to put it into action.  And she made it as far as the parking lot.  Twice.  Then they called me.  She was mad and didn’t understand why she was being forced to return.  So they put her on a locked ward for the night.

Nursing home workers call this behavior “elopement.”

Despite the fact that most of us connect this term to secretly running away with the intention of getting married, the first definition listed under “elope” in Merriam-Webster is:  to slip away, to escape.  And that is precisely what she tried to do.

When we visited the next day, my mother was confused about the night she spent on the second floor.  She thought she had been somewhere else altogether, though she recognized a similarity in the food and crockery.  She shared with me that perhaps this new place was run by the same people, and maybe even had the same chef.

We tried to reason with her but she didn’t quite grasp our various arguments, especially the one about not wanting her to get disoriented.  Her response: “How could anyone get lost in Greenwood?” (Greenwood is a small town in SC in which she grew up, but it is nowhere near her current home.)

Yesterday she also inquired about her mother, wondering where she had gone and why it was taking so long for her to reappear.  My grandmother died in the early 1990s and was buried on a hot summer day by a preacher she had never known and who, during the graveside service, mispronounced her name with excruciating regularity.  But these facts no longer register in my mother’s mind. 

Elopement.  It sounds better than it really is.