There But Not There

Episode # 88


There are times when mama just seems to be staring out into space. There are times when mama doesn’t look at you but she looks through you. She doesn’t realize there’s anything going on around her.

Over the Fourth of July weekend mamas great-granddaughter come to see her. Not mama seem to be fixated on the granddaughter but I’m not sure whether she realized it was her granddaughter or if she just realized that somebody different was in the house.

Mama was not afraid of the granddaughter because she did allow the granddaughter to feed her some food, she did talk to the granddaughter, she did hold the granddaughter’s hand. Which I believe told us that mama was not afraid of the granddaughter.

Mama was never one for the fireworks even before she got dementia now she would take us kids to see the fireworks are let us kids have fireworks at the house for the Fourth of July especially sparklers but that was back before the government said you couldn’t have a said the fireworks were dangerous. So mama didn’t even acknowledge the fact that the fireworks were on the TV this year the didn’t seem too upset her at all she didn’t react to them at all and didn’t seem to anyway.

When mama first got her dementia I would always tell her that I love her I still do that today but I used to get on I love you too or a me too however I am no longer getting tighter those all I’m getting now is oh okay. There are times when I don’t even get that all I get is the blank stare.

I understand that this dementia will eventually take everything away from mama. I’m wondering if this blank stare into space is part of the dementia taking everything away from mama. It’s a stare of almost looking through you instead of at you.

When mama broke her hip the insurance company sent in some therapist in nurses and stuff and one of the therapists worked with mom’s legs and showed Stephanie and I how to do some exercises with mom’s legs and mama reacts to those exercises especially the lake that has the broken hip. Now I don’t think the exercises are actually hurting the hip however I do believe that they are making mama a little more uncomfortable because of mama’s reaction.

I do believe that the blank stares or the stare into space is happening a little more frequent it last a little longer and it takes a little bit more to get a reaction out of mama than normal. However fortunately it doesn’t seem to last very long once we start moving mama around a little bed once we start talking to mom once we start Robin mama’s back mama comes to her self for lack of a better description.

I have not been able to pinpoint any trickier that causes this blank stare. The stare is just there at any time and I have not been able to figure out anything that’s causing it nothing that mama does nothing that’s on the TV nothing that we do here to house so I’m not sure where the stare comes from it just appears out of nowhere for no reason.

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