“They Better Sweep Up Those Teeth!”

Unless you try to understand where the Alzheimer’s patient is at the moment, you may be as confused as they appear to be.  I discovered if I tried to put myself into my mother’s world, find out where she was that day or moment, I had a much better chance of understanding what was going on.

When I walked into the nursing home dining room and Mother announced, “I saw Dr. Phillips today,” I knew I was back in 1918, when Mother graduated from high school and worked six months in the dental office of her cousin.

“That’s nice,” I remarked.  “How was he?”  From there we chatted about people of that era. 

Later, as we were having lunch (I often brown bagged it while Mother ate.), Annie, another Alzheimer’s patients decided she didn’t like her corn.  She shoved it off her plate onto the floor.

Mother looked up and without missing a beat, remarked, “They better sweep up those teeth.”

The aide assisting Annie gave me a puzzled glance.  Then I explained.  Mother often told the story, when I was a child, that after she got tired sweeping up teeth from Dr. Phillips’ office floor, she decided to be a school teacher.

So it made perfect logic, in the Alzheimer’s world Mother inhabited that day, that the corn falling to the floor was teeth in Dr. Phillips’ office.

That made me fully realize in order to understand Mother’s world, I needed to know where she was at a particular day, time, or moment.