Denial

     Page Five.
     I've done a lot of elder care in addition to child care over the years. In 1998, I was hired to be a companion to a gentleman who wasn't old, only mid-sixties, but who had a bad form of Parkinson's. I forget the exact name of his type, but it really eats away at the brain and causes severe dementia as well as the typical shakiness. He was a retired psychologist and his wife was a geriatric researcher of some type. They were quite pleasant and hired me on as she realized more and more that she didn't want him home alone while she worked full time.
     After a couple of months though, I was getting nervous because whenever he and I went out, he drove. He turned in front of oncoming traffic and made other such boo-boos that I felt endangered our safety. These boo-boos happened a few times over the course of some weeks before I finally mentioned them to his wife. She told me that she would talk with him. The next day she called me back to say that he didn't know what I was talking about and that he was going to continue driving when we were together. She said further that she trusted him and I should just calm down. I was stunned that she would take that stand, but as I needed the money I decided to keep my mouth shut and pray deeply whenever we drove together. That job wouldn't last long, only a couple more months, this was just as well.
     Some years later, I'd be the Activities Coordinator for two dementia units in a fancy shmancy nursing home. I would come to realize where this wife was coming from. She came from a land called Denial. Denial is a wonderful and effective defense mechanism some people employ when they simply can't cope with reality.Whether it's the reality of a husband's dementia, a son's drug problem or a mother's terminal cancer it protects us from terrible pain. Problem is, in the long run it ends up causing more problems than it solves. It prevents healthy decision making and proper treatment plans from being introduced into the life of the loved one in question.
     In the nursing home we once had a family move their mom onto my unit and we were given the standard "Mom's forgetful" as the forms were being filled out. Turns out that Mom was so advanced in her dementia that she'd forgotten how to feed herself. Whom did this family think they were going to fool? (They were really trying to fool themselves.) At the end of the first day, Mom was transferred to a different unit where she could be cared for properly, and family had to endure a double trauma: placing Mom in a nursing home and then receiving a phone call saying Mom was much more advanced than they realized. I would implore anybody with a demented loved one to be as honest as they possibly can be about the situation, painful as it may be. In these situations, family denial really can make it worse.