"Hello sweetie."
The common phrase that I'd heard since I was a child and the
typical greeting that she gave to anyone that came by to see her. No one
noticed that she couldn't remember anyone's names. It wasn't until we
were looking at pictures one day and she said, "Well, that's a
good-looking family. Who's that?" "That's our family, and
that's you right there in front," we told her.
As time went by things became more apparent. The pots left
on the stove. The laundry started but not finished. The repeated
questions a few minutes apart. I remember shortly before she moved into
the long term care facility, I went to visit her with my brother. She
asked me how my grandparents were (her sister and brother-in-law who had passed
away about 8 years prior). I was only 15 or 16 at the time, and I
remember the sadness in her eyes as we reminded her that my grandparents had
passed. "Oh yeah, I remember," she said. A few minutes
later, she again asked about my grandparents. Knowing the distress it
caused before, we simply smiled, and said, "they're doing just fine."
"Oh, that's great sweetie," she said.
Over the next several years, she had a slow and steady decline.
I was working at the hospital when she was admitted nearing her end
stages. She wasn't eating or drinking well, and she was having recurrent
episodes of dehydration and infections. She didn't even know her sisters
at the time. I remember walking into her room as a lab assistant to see
her smiling face and hearing, "hello, sweetie", and even though I
knew she didn't know me, for a short period of time, she was still the same
aunt I had known since childhood. Thankfully for us, dementia never took
that away from her.
- Adam Merando, MD
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