Therapeutic lying

In the current phase of my mother's dementia, the biggest problem is that she doesn't believe that she lives here.

This is apparently normal, and the question that she has been asking "When are we going home?" is very common. Telling her that we live here gets her very upset, because then we're confusing her.

What a lot of people do is say "Tomorrow", because that at least has the person expecting to stay the night, and it can calm the person down. They call it therapeutic lying.

I am not ready to do that. Lying bothers me, but if I thought it would work I could get around that. However, no matter how many things don't stick, there are always some that do. I feel positive that if we told her we were going home tomorrow, the next day she would remember that, and then it would really be a problem.

The worst part is that she's obsessing over it. She's not always asking about going home, but when she's not she's going through all the clothes and things here that she wants to take with her, things she forgot she had. She does believe we used to live here, but that there's some other place now. If this was an occasional thing, we could deflect, but she is thinking about it all the time.

I know what she really wants is to go back to a place where everything makes sense and is familiar; a place that she feels connected to now instead of in the past. It is not something we can give her.

I have some hopes that this is temporary. A few months ago she was doing it with me, where she thought I was visiting from Italy. She was very impressed with how well I spoke English and how well I knew my way around. It hurt that she could have misplaced all of our years together, but at least she was glad to have me around. She didn't keep wondering how soon I would leave.

So maybe once we get the family room repaired, and things are back to normal there, maybe things will start to look familiar again. I can see how the trips to the laundromat make thing seem unsettled. Maybe it's because the yard is so overgrown, and if we get that fixed, then it will seem like home again.

Or that might be something we never get back.