McHenry County Opinion

Oliver: With dementia, sometimes it’s best to play along in order to keep the peace

One night when my mother lived with us, she got up and was walking around her room, the shuffling enough to rouse me from sleep.

My mother, who was 85 at the time, had vascular dementia, and she often would get up in the middle of the night.

When I gently asked her what was going on, she said she was waiting for her mother to arrive.

My maternal grandmother had died decades earlier, when my own mother was a young child.

By this time in my mother’s dementia, she would constantly tell me about the “little people” that she saw. She would tell me that it was a couple with a child who often would ask for money or help.

To my mother, these “people” were very real.

When my mother started seeing things, I did what a lot of family members do: I tried to correct her. I would point out that there weren’t airplanes landing in her bedroom, that her comforter was not covered in bugs and that there weren’t moths flying up into the light fixture on the ceiling.

This tended to make my mother agitated and angry. I was calling her a liar, or so she’d tell me, and she wasn’t a liar.

No, I knew she wasn’t making it up. She really saw these things.

I found myself at a loss. I was having a hard time interacting with my mother without making her mad. This, of course, was not my intention, so I needed a new strategy.

I took a class about communicating with people with dementia that was offered by the Alzheimer’s Association. The instructor suggested trying to enter the “reality” of the person with dementia to validate what they are experiencing.

An article I found at the time likened it to being an improv actor. When another actor speaks a line, you go with it. Instead of telling my mother that what she was seeing was wrong, I’d try to work with what she was giving me.

That restless night when my mother was waiting for my grandmother, I pointed out that it was too late for the train to be coming in. We’d look for her in the morning. In the meantime, maybe it would be best to get some rest.

Much to my surprise, my mother calmed down and climbed back into bed. The next morning, she had no memory of ever asking to see her mother.

Other times, when my mother insisted that the “little people” wanted money, I’d offer to leave a couple of dollars out on her dresser. If they really wanted the money, they could have it. Of course, the money always would be sitting there when we’d get back to her room, but I didn’t try to argue with her anymore.

In some circles, what I was doing is something called therapeutic lying. A recent Wall Street Journal article raised questions about the ethics of such a practice.

In my own case, I know how difficult it was to try to correct my mother each and every time she saw something that wasn’t there. Instead, I would acknowledge what she was seeing and then did my best to redirect her as quickly as I could.

I also know how easy it would be to take advantage of someone who has dementia using similar tactics. Clearly there must be limits, and the intention must be one of kindness, not cruelty.

That’s one of the reasons that I also made it a practice to go over my mother’s finances with her each month. I’m not completely sure she understood what I was saying, but I felt much better showing her that everything was being handled correctly. I never wanted her to think that I was trying to take advantage of her.

Do I regret trying to meet my mother in her own reality, even if that meant playing along in her delusions? Not at all. It made her happier, and it allowed me to make her last few years as peaceful as possible.

Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.

Joan Oliver

Joan Oliver

A 30-year newspaper veteran who has been a copy editor, front-page editor, presentation editor, assistant news editor and publication editor, as well as a columnist and host of an online newspaper newscast.