Dementia

I remember when mum was in the early stages of her Dementia and I dropped her off at a senior’s activity group at my old primary school. It was like day care for oldies, and was held in my old Kindergarten room.  The school was no longer being used as a primary school due to dropping enrolments. Being in an older suburb with an aging population the school buildings had been re-birthed as a community service provider.

It was an interesting juxtaposition to be dropping my nervous and clingy mum off to my old kindergarten room, some 30 years after she had probably done the same thing to me on my first day at big school. The kindergarten room still looked almost exactly the same with the big coloured circle on the ground.  The furniture had changed to suit its new inhabitants, but it still had the same old feel and look about it.  I could almost still see the toys and maths equipment arranged on the low shelves around the edges of the room.

 

Mum was feeling nervous because she was in the first stages of dementia and was not really sure what was happening to her. Things that she had always done, like walking to the shops, started to pose real difficulties for her.  She really liked to walk and to get out around the neighbourhood, but she kept getting lost. Luckily nothing bad had ever happened to her and she always seemed to be found by someone who knew the family well enough to get into contact with us. She was no longer able to form attachments with new people, her world was narrowing drastically to the immediate family and a very few friends and neighbours who kept in contact with her.  She was reasonably well known, but she didn’t know many others, apart from those who formed a significant part of her life.

So being dropped off into a room of strangers was, at first, an uncomfortable experience for her. She no longer possessed the social skills to build a rapport with strangers.  I assume many of the others in the room were in the same situation.  It was the role of the group facilitator to get the group to gel. I imagine it would not be an easy task.  At least the oldies would have been better behaved and had a better developed sense of social appropriateness than the newly arrived kindergarteners who had populated the room in years past.

For me the experience was bizarre, that all these years later finding our roles had reversed.