Visiting My Friend

 

Today, after mass, I went to visit my friend who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. She was not in the room where I had visited her before and I found out she was on the 2nd floor in Room 402. She now has a roommate but no one was in the room. I asked an aide where my friend could be and she said, "She's sitting in the hall with other people." I must have gone right passed her and did not see her. She looks good with her salt and pepper hair and she was wearing a green top, green and black checkered bottoms. and yellow hospital slippers. 

I got up close to her and took off my mask, and she stared at me. There was no response as I told her who I was and asked her how she was doing. I sat on a small couch with two other people and tried talking to her. She is in a world of her own. She did tell me she played ball and made the motions like playing volleyball so I said, "You played volleyball?" She nodded. She seemed fixated with my hair and kept pointing at it and saying something but I never understood what she was saying. I told her it was a wig and she had never seen me with such short hair. There was no response as she talked about something else.

She looks around a lot at all the other patients and would say something and my guess was that she was telling me about them but it was very difficult to understand what she is saying. There were three women working on a puzzle at a table nearby, one woman kept talking in what sounded like Russian but no body answered her, a heavy set man in a mobilized wheel chair kept going back and forth, and I noticed a lot of kidding around by the nurses or aides. There seemed to be more workers than patients and I counted about seven workers. One man, with his head hanging down to his chest was fast asleep and he slept all the time I was there. The lady on the couch next to me told me her brother has Alzheimer's and that he has been in the facility for two years. He used to play football and she thinks that might have caused his dementia. He is seventy-one years old. This horrible disease strikes people of all ages. At one point he told an aide that the woman was his daughter. The mind just stops being normal.

The letters with pictures that I send her are taped on the wall in her new room. I wonder if she looks at them and remembers.

I was there for over an hour and the visit was a guessing game.  She would say something and I would try to guess what she was saying. If I got it right, she sometimes nodded but other times she continued with another conversation. When I said good-bye there was no reaction. I hugged her and got no response. She never said bye and even when I waved she did not wave back. I wondered if she thought I was one of the workers!

My friend is physically there but her mind is somewhere else. She is the same person I knew but
different because we can't reminisce like we used to. I pray that in her own world she is content and happy.

                                                

                                                              "Although your loved one

may not remember you or

might do things that frustrate you, 

this is the time when he or she

needs you the most."

Angie Nunez Merryman