End of Holidays

My mother-in-law forgot my husband had been on holidays and had to return to work. Just like that, she forgot he had been home with her for almost the whole week. She wanted to know where he had gone this afternoon. I had to remind her everything is normal, my husband will be home after he goes to work and the children and I are still here. The poor woman had a shaken look--just for a moment and then reality reasserted itself. The dementia isn't constant; sometimes, my mother-in-law is as right as rain and everything is normal and right and then a curtain falls and someone else is there with a vague look in her eye. We have a doctor's appointment for early January.

It is causing tremendous stress between my husband and me. It is as though there is a debate between us: the matriarch is more normal with me than with you. Rationally, I know my mother-in-law is more calm, more focused when she is with my husband. But I also believe my husband sees what he wants to see and excuses a lot of my mother-in-law's behaviour. My oldest child has become upset about the situation and I don't think my husband understood how much until this weekend. And, even then, he shrugged it off. I know it is about to get very hard. I, at least, talk to people who are in or who have been in similar situations, and I feel somewhat prepared; my husband keeps saying his mother will die before she gets too bad. I don't know which he sees as worse his mother's dementia or her death. He doesn't talk about either and retreats into himself.

My husband's birthday is after Christmas; my youngest child's was last week. If the matriarch is to die around the holidays, I feel awful wishing it would happen sooner rather than later. I don't want her to die now but I would rather she die now than on Christmas or on my husband's birthday. Then, of course, this could all be moot and she could go on for years...I am trying to be pragmatic on one level but living with the constant worry about how the matriarch will behave or if she will die is awful. One cannot get used to it. Age is not an illness; funny, how the old can be institutionalized as though they can recover from age. It feels strange to have the shadow of death as a constant presence in my house. The anticipation is always there but I also think about my own death a lot. Ironically, in some ways, it has made me more fearless about my life. I am learning to ski and I am going to get the children a dog.