Visiting Friends

In the past two days I've visited two friends in senior living facilities -- I'll call them Bill and Mike.  I have been friends with Bill for more than 25 years, and I've been visiting him regularly since he began living where he is now.  I know Mike as the husband of Amy's friend, and he just moved in to his facility this week.  Mike's facility is quite near our home, so I will be able to visit him regularly.  Bill is quite a bit farther away, but I've been trying to see him most days.

Bill is in his late 90s and shows considerable evidence of lost mental acuity, but he does not have Alzheimer's disease.  He easily recognizes me when I approach him, although I doubt he could recall my name.  Some days for him are better than others, but only rarely does he seem down.  He laughs easily, and he enjoys it when I read the Bible to him.  Aside from how easily he laughs, I can't help noticing how grateful he is about everything, especially about the people who work there and care for him.  But he's always been that way.

I have been trying to make a video of Bill's life, mainly through interviews.  He can remember his early life on the farm and through high school, but things get hazy after that.  He remembers his service in WWII (wounded in combat), but he has lost the detail that he would relate to me ten years ago.  The project is on hold until his wife is able to jog his memory some more.

Bill does struggle, both physically and mentally.  He has been falling a lot lately, often at night, and we're worried that he might hit his head on something.  But he's usually alert and coherent.  When someone falls in the facility, the first thing the workers do to assess head injury is ask who the president of the United States is.  Bill always seems to know that when I ask him in my own effort to assess where he is at on a particular day.

One day when I visited Bill, he was uncharacteristically down.  He said he was broke and in debt, and he needed a job.  I didn't argue with him, at least not at first.  He then asked me why no one in the facility was wearing their uniforms.  I asked him where he thought we were, and he said on a military base somewhere.  (After leaving the Army, Bill worked as a civilian for the Air Force for many years.)  I asked him what year he thought it was, and he told me, with some uncertainty, 1962.  We spent some time reading the Bible, and I left.

I returned the next day, and he was as well as I'd seen him.  I asked him if he remembered the day before, and he said yes, and he seemed to have a clear recollection of our visit.  He even remembered believing we were on a military base.  He thought I'd chosen the perfect passages in the Bible reading.  His memory is very inconsistent.

His wife visits him every morning, and she usually finds him waiting for her in the lobby.  When I see him in the afternoon he rarely remembers that she was there that morning.

Mike is a different story.  He is in his late 80s, maybe 90, and I don't know him well.  He does display unambiguous evidence of dementia, likely Alzheimer's disease, and his wife was no longer able to care for him at home.  He believed there were three women living in their home -- one who cooked, one who did the laundry, and one who took him to the doctor.

I saw Mike today, two days after he moved into the memory care facility.  I found him in the TV room with two or three other residents.  One woman in a wheelchair was angrily trying to get through a security door to a small courtyard outside.  It kept alarming, until someone from the staff accompanied her outside.  Once outside, she tried to sweep the courtyard from her wheelchair.  Soon she was happy to come in but then wanted help finding food for her mother.  The commotion and the TV made it hard to talk to Mike, but he was happy to see me and had a lot to tell me.

But what Mike had to say didn't make a lot of sense.  He wasn't happy to be there, but he seemed resigned to it.  He complained that if he could only drive a car he would have more freedom.  But he knew he couldn't.  I inferred these things from what he said over a 30 or 40 minute period of time.  He generally spoke in complete sentences that seemed to be meaningful but were unconnected and had no context.  So most of what he said made no sense.  He did not speak in "word salad" as each sentence was a coherent statement, but maybe it was more like a sentence salad.

When I left Mike, i told him that I lived nearby, and I'd be back to see him again sometime soon.