The Yellow Wallpaper

My father died in November, 1999, just two weeks before the 52nd anniversary of his wedding to my mother. My parents never had a real social group–both came from large families, so their brothers and sisters, along with a few neighbors, were the only people they spent any time with. My mother was 77 years old when my father died, and it was right after that when I remember the first signs of dementia.

Or maybe they were present before he died, but she was so absorbed in looking after him that none of us noticed. She handled his death, which happened very suddenly at home, extremely well, but our family suffered a remarkable strings of deaths during the year that followed. Two weeks after my father, the wife of one of my mother’s brothers died, and a little over a month after that, my mother’s sister died. About two months later, the following spring, my father’s sister died suddenly, and four months after that, the wife of one of my father’s brothers died after a long battle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease. My mother had been stoic throughout, but began to slide into a persistent depression. Over the next few years, another brother-in-law, yet another sister, and a niece of my mother’s followed. By this time my mother had been prescribed an antidepressant, and she had begun what has become a neverending complaint about her legs.

Although I didn’t realize it, my mother’s first distinct warning sign was her growing inability to handle her financial affairs. She had majored in math at college, and had always shared the family accounting responsibilities with my father. Statements and cancelled checks would be foldered and filed in the metal cabinet in the den. Her checking account was always balanced to the penny. But sometime before my father’s death, she had become enchanted by all the sweepstakes offers that drifted into their mailbox. The more she replied to Publishers’ Clearing House, Reader’s Digest and Time/Life, the more junk they sent her and the more mailing lists she was on. She bought all kinds of trinkets and coffee table books in the hopes that she would win the grand prize. My sister and I would roll our eyes each Super Bowl Sunday, when she fully expected the “Prize Patrol” to pull up in front of the house.

But what we considered mildly exasperating was getting more and more serious. In the fall of 2003 she received an overdraft notice from her bank. I thought it odd, since her account had overdraft protection, but guessed that it was a mistake. Unfortunately, it wasn’t: my mother had been writing checks to all kinds of twilight charities and bogus sweepstakes, and she’d used up her entire overdraft line of credit. By the time we got it straightened out, about six checks had bounced, costing her a further $200 or so dollars.

I took over her bill paying at that point–she could not understand what she’d done wrong, no matter how we explained it to her. I think I took over by finally telling her that I wanted to switch to online bill paying–it had all become a chore to her in any case, and so she readily agreed. I first tried to backtrack in the record-keeping by digging up her bank statements–which were all over the house–and cancelled checks (many were missing altogether) for the year. I calculated that she’d spent over a thousand dollars on “charities” with names that only sounded like the legitimate groups: the National Heart Association, for example. Many checks were made out to an acronym that I just couldn’t trace. On the other hand, her automobile insurance had been cancelled for nonpayment.

To make matters worse, in those pre-”Do Not Call Registry” days, she was getting daily telephone calls from foreign sweepstakes that were trying to swindle the so-called “winnings tax” out of her by promising to send her the prize. About a month before the Do Not Call Registry began taking names, someone called pretending to be a Registry representative and told her she needed to pay $350 to have her name taken off the marketers’ lists. She gave them her checking account number over the phone. (Note: in Rhode Island, unless the bank has a copy of a signed receipt or a tape recording of assent, they must reimburse the account holder whatever money was electronically debited.)

I did not once entertain the idea that dementia was involved. I told myself it was her age, her tendency to trust strangers, all the newfangled bank fees and procedures. I traipsed to the bank each time something needed to be undone and undid it.

Fortunately I did make an appointment with a lawyer who had an arrangement with AARP, in order to have my mother’s will made out. This lawyer, God bless her, suggested that she might want to think about granting me durable power of attorney, and my sister a medical proxy, which she did and which has made the subsequent trouble a lot less awful than it might have been. AARP members can have a simple will drawn by a participating attorney for a very modest fee (I think it was $50 about four years ago)–more than worth the annual membership fee.

In early 2004–February 25, to be exact–my telephone rang at about 10 PM. It was my mother, wanting to know if that day had been my sister’s birthday. I told her she was a month early but after hanging up, I felt the first wave of a queasiness I have since come to know well. I managed to shake the feeling. A few months later, my mother was having a bout of serious anxiety and arranged to see her doctor at 2 PM one afternoon. When she wasn’t home by 5 PM I set out to find her, stopping first at the pharmacy, in case she’d had to pick up some medicine. Not there. I retraced the route to the doctor’s office. No sign of her. I was in a panic until I finally got in touch with her by phone at home. She was rattled–she had pulled out of her doctor’s parking lot and turned in the wrong direction. We never figured out precisely where she ended up–but she’d gotten lost in the state she’s lived in all her life, and it took her nearly three hours to make a 20-minute drive home.

I think this was when I first allowed myself to consider that something more than “old age” might be occurring, but I still wasn’t thinking of dementia.