Saturday I flew to London to have lunch with my mom. She was there on a field trip with the people from her memory care facility. She was having a good time, and had even managed to acquire two suitors, one of whom had proposed marriage, though she didn’t think he was a good prospect. (Of course you have suitors, I told her, because you’re so pretty. She smugly agreed.) The only problem was that some gypsy kids had stolen her wallet while they were in Paris, and she didn’t have any cash. I gave her some, and that made her happy.
Of course, we weren’t in London. We were in the same restaurant where we usually go for lunch when I take her out, and she was eating the same thing she always orders there. (If I’d known where she thought she was, I would have ordered her fish and chips!) I hadn’t flown to London, and she hadn’t been in Paris. I did in fact give her some cash, a couple of twenties, but that was just to make her happy. She has a tendency to hide cash and other things she regards as valuable for fear of theft, which mostly just means that nobody can find them again without turning her room at the memory care place upside down. (And sometimes not then.)
She has, we’re told, Lewy Body Dementia, and her decline has been steep. Lately most of her delusions have been cheerful, and we just go along with them. I mean, it’s better to be on a trip to London with suitors attracted by your prettiness than in a memory care place (where, alas, she’s one of the more-functional “inmates,” as she sometimes calls them) where you will probably stay until you die unless you get sent to a nursing home first.
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