Hard Water

Is it Alzheimer’s or my mother that makes the act of drinking water exhausting? By AGECRAFT Guest Writer Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons

The first thing I did whenever I walked into my parents’ assisted-living apartment during my recent extended visit over the holidays was check whether there was a glass of water on the table next to my mother’s rocking chair. The sight of an empty coaster made me livid with my father for his failure to place one there for her.

Hydrating is theoretically an easy thing to do, but like everything else with my mother since her Alzheimer’s has progressed, water is hard.

Not that my mother has ever been easy. She’s always argued every point, no matter how small, and I’ve long wondered whether arrogance or insecurity drives her dogged need to be right. Once, while eating at a Panera Bread near my parents’ home in Saint Augustine, Florida, before my older sister drove me to the airport, I joked with my family that if you told my mother, “The sky is blue,” she would immediately counter, “Not if it’s cloudy.” My mother didn’t laugh and refused to hug me goodbye as I left for New York.

Now that she’s 82 and her Alzheimer’s made my parents move into assisted living near my sister in Jacksonville, drinking water, or rather, getting my mother to drink water, can make all the difference. Drinking water means getting dressed and leaving the apartment to go to Bingo or the daily social hour in the bar area of the assisted living place (with the super-Florida name, Sea Grass), so I can partake of the one glass of wine allotted to visitors. Or, staying in the apartment all day in her housecoat with the blinds drawn and the door to the balcony blocked because of my mother’s increasing fear that her little black cat, Mandy, will get out.

“She sneaks out of the apartment at night,” my mother told me numerous times while sundowning on a dry day, “And then I have to go find her.”

The cat has never even tried to get out of the apartment, but my mother’s disease and dehydration make this her reality.

Drinking water means playing the oversized Connect Four I discovered on Sea Grass’s back lawn and actually getting to feel the sun on my face for 30 minutes, while my mother sits in a chair and I scramble around to pick up the hockey-puck-sized disks at the end of each game. Or, simply saying “Okay” when my mom argues that I can’t be her daughter because “Kelly was here earlier and left already.”

Because now, there’s no point in arguing with her, and because insisting that “No, I’m Kelly” does nothing but make me cry.

(Sidenote: Regardless of her Alzheimer’s, my mother refused to remember to call me Kelly Jean since I started going by my first and middle name in high school. So, I’ve learned to let that go. See what a good job I’m doing?)

Drinking water means successfully coaxing my mother into taking a much-needed shower instead of waving the nurse aide away for whatever excuse she has come up with today. Or, getting slapped for pushing her too hard.

Getting my mother to drink water makes a blessed difference. So why can’t my father make sure she has water? Here’s why: You can’t just tell my mother to drink water. When you do finally go “roust” (as my father says) her out of bed around 10, 11, or even noon, you must wordlessly hand her an eight-ounce glass as she slowly gets up. Then, nod when she inevitably says, “I’ve been awake for hours, but I slept terribly last night. So, I didn’t feel like getting up. I’ve just been lying in here, playing with Mandy.”

When you hand her the water, she will say, “Is this for me? Why?”

“Yes. It’s good to drink water when you first get up.”

She will drink two solid sips; then you can tell her that you’ll put the rest on the table beside her chair. Afterwards, you’ll have this conversation as long as you stay in the apartment.

“Can you dump this glass for me? It’s been sitting out all night.”

“No, it’s new. I just put that there for you.”

“You did? Thank you.”

The good thing is that whenever she looks down and sees the water, she takes a sip. The bad thing is, every fourth or fifth sip, she’ll look down and say, “Can you dump this glass for me? It’s been sitting out all night.”

Other things that make water hard:

The glass can’t be too big.

The glass can’t be too full (the cat might knock it over).

Water with a meal has to have lemon and a straw, even though she rarely uses the straw.

It can’t have too much ice, or else each time she takes a sip, my mother will grimace, say, “My, that’s cold,” and complain about the amount of ice for the entire meal or social hour.

If there is no ice, she will complain that the water is warm.

If you order her water with “a little bit of ice,” it will start out okay, but eventually the ice will melt, and she will complain that there’s no ice.

The last on the list is what often happens when we sit at the Sea Grass social hour, coloring, which is the happiest time I have with my mother, and not just since her Alzheimer’s took hold. Watching my teenage niece navigate her ADHD gave shape to the undiagnosed reason why my mother couldn’t stay present, flitting away in the middle of half-watched movies and heartfelt conversations the second something else crossed her mind. Leaving me to swim against the stream of her consciousness to recapture her attention.

Now, the weird blessing of this disease is that, if you can get her locked in, my mother will focus all the attention she has left on a singular activity to completion. At 48, I’ve spent more hours “playing” with my mother in the past two years than I did in my entire childhood. What we both love most are the cat-centric coloring books drawn by an artist friend of mine in New York. My mother pages through each book, delighted by the adorable cat drawings and astonished by how many pictures she’s already colored. Thank goodness she had the idea to initial and date our completed masterpieces when I gave her the first one last year for Christmas.

Out of our handful of repeated conversations, this is my favorite:

“Kelly, where did you get these again?”

“My friend Ashley makes them.”

“Oh, that’s right. You told me that. And does she sell them?”

“Yes, at local art fairs and online.”

“She is a very talented young woman.”

The level of engagement that coloring provides my mother is perfect, and my allotted glass of wine is life-saving. Amidst my anger and frustration, there is gratitude for the increasingly rare afternoons where water has granted us this time together and guilt for enjoying the focused activity Alzheimer’s has trapped my mother’s brain into.

There is also hubris that I can fix everything somehow by getting water “right.” Impossible because Alzheimer’s or no, my mother is still my mother, even when she doesn’t remember that I’m her daughter.

One day, at social hour, I thought I’d cracked the drink challenge. After setting my mother up with coloring books and a big box of Crayola Twistables colored pencils (which I highly recommend because the twist-up feature means you don’t have to sharpen them), I ordered our drinks at the bar. White wine for me, and because my mother was feeling saucy that day, Ginger Ale for her with no ice. Then, I ordered a second glass of just ice so she could control the ice-to-liquid ratio herself.

“Did you get a spoon? For the ice?” my mother asked, extinguishing my excitement.

“Oh, get over yourself already,” I snapped, breaking. “Just use your freaking fingers.”

The awesome thing about Alzheimer’s is that you and your mother can yell at each other in the middle of a bar in the middle of senior living—to the point where the other residents who have nicknamed you “the coloring crew” and the bartender who winks as she fills your one glass of wine to the tippy top look concerned—and then, literally two minutes later, can be coloring happily as if nothing had ever happened. My mother doesn’t remember the yelling, and next time I’ll remember the spoon.

No wonder my father, who is also 82 and has severe mobility issues after a terrible fall a few years ago, can’t keep up with the water. He sacrificed so much for my mother throughout their marriage, including his own independence by moving into assisted living with her. My mother has exhausted him, but he won’t put her in memory care because, after 55 years of marriage, he doesn’t know how to live without her.

“Why even do any of these things if I can’t remember them?” my mother had asked on Christmas when, after being surprised that today was, in fact, Christmas, she was upset to learn we’d gone to my sister’s for Christmas Eve dinner, and she had no memory of the night before.

So, why bother? With water? With any of it?

Shortly before I left for New York, I was getting my mother a glass of water from the complimentary station, or what I like to call “hotel water,” in Sea Grass’s lobby. She’ll drink it on the days when lemon slices float inside.

“Have you seen the game?” she whispered to me while leaning over her walker to take the styrofoam cup (Florida!) of water out of my hands.

“What game?”

“In the backyard. There’s this game. You have to come see it. Your father taught me how to play.”

She meant the oversized Connect Four that I’d shown her, but I knew better than to argue. She didn’t remember that it was me who played with her until my back ached from picking all the pieces up off the ground over and over. Still, something was in there. Something good had stuck. Drinking water is important. Even when it’s hard.