calherewecome

Time for an update on Mary. Overall, she is doing pretty good for a 91 year old. Her mind is failing faster than her body.

A couple of days ago, one of our friends who attends our senior Bible Study at Ocean View asked us how she was doing. Mary didn’t attend that particular Wednesday. So he asked Paula, “She must be getting excited that she will be getting to meet Jesus in heaven?”.

To which we answered, actually no she hasn’t talked about heaven, the after-life or Jesus lately. She doesn’t really talk at all about death. I think that she figures that she is going to live forever.

A couple of years ago she was full of questions about what God wanted her to do with the rest of her life. But lately, there is none of that. Just what am I doing today.

She seems to be pretty much stuck in the moment. She doesn’t talk about the past and/or the future. For the most part, she gets up in the morning, eats breakfast and goes back to bed. Sometimes we get her to go out for activities like Bible study, church, getting her hair done, etc.

Yesterday, she received her high school reunion announcement in the mail. This is an event that happens every Memorial Day in Piedmont, KS. The problem we have with going, is that it takes a lot of effort to get her there. She can’t fly there by herself and deal with airlines, rental cars and hotels. Paula took her there last year. Once she goes and returns, she doesn’t remember that the trip happened. And to add to that, last year her sister Bobbie and brother Jack, didn’t make the trip. Even if they had, she probably wouldn’t have remembered it. Our biggest fear is having an accident happen far away from home.

I read an essay by a gerontologist recently about how old people develop “unmet needs”. This is the ability for a person to deal with the tasks of everyday life. (eg. grocery shopping, banking, paying bills, mail, medical, personal hygiene, etc.) As a person ages into senility and dementia they are unable to do deal with these sorts of things. Over the past 2.5 years, Paula and I have slowly taken on all of those daily tasks.

So this morning, she was scheduled to get her done at 09:30 followed by attending a funeral for a family friend. At 08:30 she tells us that she doesn’t feel well and wouldn’t be attending. She will probably feel better later in the day. So we call Rose and reschedule. Rose is very understanding of our need to be flexible.

In other news, I was walking Mary down to the garage. She stumbled for no apparent reason, (ie. no water, no trip hazards, no cracks in the pavement, etc). Just clean dry even pavement. She caught herself with her cane. I told her that if she didn’t have her cane she surely would have fallen, followed by a trip in an ambulance to local ER. But she doesn’t remember that. She just has the crazy idea that someday she will be better and able to ditch the cane.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any recent pictures to post. I will try to do better next time.

TTFN,

Joe

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This entry was posted on April 17, 2015 at 6:42 am and is filed under Family, Mary. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Mary