By Bob DeMarco
When a person has Alzheimer’s disease or another type of dementia they are often difficult to understand. The behaviors they express are often difficult to accept.
It can be hard to deal with a person living with Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia.
It is hard to understand that a person can’t remember. Harder to accept that when they can’t remember, they will do things that are completely foreign to your frame of reference.
Each of us has emotions and feelings. Alzheimer’s has a way of bringing out the worst of these feelings and emotions in us.
The challenge — learning to deal with a person living with Alzheimer’s on their own terms. Learning to deal with Alzheimer’s disease.
Many caregivers come to the conclusion that the person living with Alzheimer’s is not the person they knew. The person they knew most or all of their life.
Is it possible to deal with a stranger? Is this supposed stranger likable?
Can you like someone that continually makes you angry, frustrated and sad?
See what is happening? You make the situation about you. This is not the person I knew.
But Alzheimer’s caregiving is not only about you. It is also about the person living with the disease.
The “live – eR” cannot help or change the way they are acting. But, you can change the way you are acting or feeling.
Sooner or later you have to start by reminding yourself this is my Mom, this is my Dad, this is my Husband, this is my Wife.
Here is something I learned on the Alzheimer’s Reading Room. Alzheimer’s caregivers want to give, and try very hard to give, the person living with AD the highest quality of life possible.
Striving for this goal is difficult. Near the beginning, it seems impossible for most of us.
How? How do you do it?
I finally learned to accept AD by conceptualizing a new and different world – Alzheimer’s World. For reasons that are hard to explain, once I started understanding this parallel world, I started feeling calmer. Amazingly, as I became calmer so did my mother Dotty.
In Alzheimer’s World, all the new, different, and disconcerting behaviors that come with Alzheimer’s are the norm. The normal. Behaviors that you come to expect and accept.
When you step into this parallel universe, you start to accept these behaviors. With acceptance comes understanding and peace of mind.
Once you accept and understand, the environment changes. Everything slows down. You slow down. Instead of feeling chaos and stress, you start to feel comfortable.
The Alzheimer’s patient starts to feel different also. They feel your acceptance. Instead of thinking you are the enemy, they start to feel that you are the protector. Their security blanket.
Did you ever wonder why most Alzheimer’s patients stick like glue to their caregiver?Call out their name when they can’t see them? Want to know where you are when they can’t see you?
This happens because you are the security blanket. You are the one person that makes a person suffering from Alzheimer’s feel secure. You are their attachment to the World. A world that at times seems scary, confusing, and unnerving to them.
Some caregivers might conclude that a person living with Alzheimer’s is not the person they knew. Let’s flip the coin.
What is the person living with Alzheimer’s feeling?
I suspect they might be feeling you are the only person they can trust. The only person they can rely on through thick and thin.
Alzheimer’s patients might not be able to remember the short term; however, they can certainly feel.
It is likely that they are relying on you more than you can imagine. They might not be able to tell you this. But deep down inside they know, You are the ONE.
So flip the coin, instead of thinking you are the ONE. Think, I am the ONE person in the world that this person can rely on.
Without me, they would be “scared to death”, alone, and sinking fast into the dark hole of Alzheimer’s.
Without you.
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