My neighbor, Miss Deborah, has dementia. Or mental illness. Or something else. All I know she is my mother’s age but she appears to be a few decades older. Her skin is paper thin. Her voice slurs from what I assume is a combination of medications for her various physical ailments. When I visit, which I try to do every other Sunday or so, she will offer me a seat on the portable toilet beside her bed. “See, the seat’s down so you won’t sit on anything honey,” she says reassuringly, patting the toilet seat.
She once had a full life. She was a kindergarten teacher. She still, in many ways, is a kindergarten teacher. She speaks carefully and slowly and with exaggerated patience when I can tell her dutiful husband and 24/7 caretaker husband, Richard (a past coach and history teacher himself) says something that annoys her. When our conversation lags, she points to a stack of magazines she has sitting on her bed.
“You see those?” she asks. “Those there are my job. I get some scissors and I just cut them out.”
“Noooo,” I inwardly moan, my worst self itching to get out of the cramped suffocating room so I can go on a Sunday run, knowing that she is about to take me on a tour through the pages. But it’s too late. She’s already on page 4, pointing out every single large font and picture she can decipher. “Now you see that there is a recipe for a BBQ Crockpot dinner, and see, first you toss that in with that and then I cut out that picture. . . .And there, there’s a doll set you see you can buy made out of 100% porcelain and see it’s just $49.95 for the full set, honey. So I cut that one out too.”
She has sticktoitiveness, that Miss Deborah. Once she gets going she will hit every single page of the magazine to point out all the highlights. “She isn’t wrong,” I think, marveling. “She can still decode words perfectly in the fog of whatever is going on.” It is clear to me she has found a refuge, life-raft sort of function in these magazines. Here is visceral proof she is still of-the-world. She gets it. She is in. I can imagine her kindergarten teacher self having students practice collage in a similar way. “Can you identify items that start with A?” she might have said. “Cut them out and glue them to the construction paper! A little dab’ll do ya!”
After a particularly rough health stretch featuring a fall and a new dosage of medicine, Mr. Richard called to ask if I might speak with her a few moments to calm her down. She engaged in a circular story centered around the magazines. What had been her Savior now has now been twisted into a torment. “Those people making me look at magazines,” she slurred, “I called them and told them after the holidays I’m just not coming back! It’s killing my shoulder having to cut all of those things out. No sir, I said. I’m not coming back.”
I fruitlessly explained four times that she deserved a rest, and no one expected her to painstakingly page through magazines. It’s not a real job, Miss Deborah; just a hobby of yours! She ignored this plot point, and reminded me that her shoulder was killing her and she was quitting. I decided to join her world and encouraged her to quit. “Some bosses are just unreasonable,” I said in an agreeing sort of way.
Miss Deborah spent her last few fairly healthy years, as I understand it, swimming at the YMCA pool and shopping non-stop online. Her son’s old room is now dedicated to housing hundreds of expensive dolls, which, when she was in better health, she loved introducing me to one by one. I marvelled at her fascination with them. The room felt haunted, so occupied by blank stares of glass eyeballs and fake curly blonde hair. “Now this one was a real good deal,” Miss Deborah said, “I got it for a steal.”
I’m worried now, about her husband. He is beginning to show his 8th decade age, and the wear and tear of constantly being on call as the sole sound mind and able body in the household. Recently, while I was about 3 miles away from the house running, he gave me a call. “Deborah fell, Julie. She’s fine, but I can’t get her up.” Panicked, I called another neighbor and also Lucy to go check on them. By the time Lucy and Zander got over there another neighbor was helping her up. Everything was fine, but to live on the edge of catastrophe like this is no small thing.
Last week, the smell of medicine was strong and Miss Deborah was excited to show me a ring she had found, “Honey I don’t know what kind of ring this is, but here it is,” she said, holding up a large thick band. Richard peeked his head in, “Deb, that’s your high school class ring.” She was in a good mood last week, without her usual frustration with her husband and his helpful comments. “Oh,” she said innocently and without skipping a beat jumped to another topic: “Julie, honey, next time you take that big dog of yours for a walk, will you come pick me up too? I’d like to go on one of those fast walks with you.” I blinked back a tear. I didn’t know what to say. I looked her full in the face. “Sure, Miss Deborah,” I lied. “Will do.”