12/03/2017
My most memorable Client.
I have had so many clients over the 12 years that I have been a personal consultant to families that have a family member with one of the dementias, but one stands out as my most difficult but also most rewarding case. She was 92 years old, and recently passed away from both breast cancer and from her dementia. I was with her for her last 7 years. I would like to tell you of my time with her.
I’ll call her Debby (not her real name, of course). I was called in to the case by the administrator of the family trust, on recommendation from the neurologist that diagnosed her with mid-stage dementia, probably of the Alzheimer’s type. She was rich. I mean stinkin’ filthy rich. She had a Picasso hanging in her living room. It didn’t even have an honored place on the wall. It was just one of her paintings. That’s how rich she was.
Her last husband had died a few years before. Her son lived across the country and visited her every year or two. That was a good thing because even though he claimed that he loved her, the two together were like oil and water. No, worse than that. When they were together, it took no time at all for arguments and agitation to ensue. We’d have to calm her down afterward. UGH!!!
She lived in a condo in the best condo building (at the time) in the most expensive part of Dallas. Attending to her was her husband’s butler, who had stayed on after her husband died. He knew nothing about Alzheimer’s and how to deal with it. I did a lot of teaching/coaching to him over the years, and I think that it took a long time for him to wrap his head around the fact that she really did have a dementia. It wasn’t until her last year of life that he fully came to believe it. His job was as house man, meaning cooking, cleaning, shopping and running errands for her.
Debby had grown up poor in Oklahoma, but over the years had acquired great wealth through her marriages. It didn’t hurt that she was a beauty. I mean a Hollywood Starlet beauty. And in fact, she was a Hollywood Starlet. In the house were pictures of her with Hollywood directors, producers and actors of the era. She was friends with people like Howard Hughes, Frank Sinatra, and many other familiar Hollywood stars of that era.
Over the years, she had learned to be what I call “entitled”. Apparently, everyone kowtowed to her every wish. Now with mid stage Alzheimer’s, the filter was off. She could and did regularly verbally slice you up like so much meat waiting for the butcher’s knife. I mean, she could push every one of your buttons when she wanted to, and she wanted to a lot.
She had the usual mid-stage paranoia, heightened by the fact she had so many possessions to misplace and then accuse others of stealing from her. When I arrived, the local police and fire department departments were so tired of her constant 911 calls that they asked the trust to “so something to stop the calls”.
Ironically, she was really was being scammed and robbed of some of her jewelry by some “new” friends who claimed that they were jewelry appraisers who would take her jewelry to be appraised. She’d forget that it was gone, and it was never seen again. OH BOY! I had to discreetly (as one could never let this information out due to her position in society) stop this from happening again. What did we do? We prevented the scammers from seeing her, calling her or communicating with her in any fashion. They were persistent, but we were vigilant. It took a few months but they finally stopped trying to contact her. On to greener fields I presume.
I knew that I would have to find the world’s best caregiver to contend with this mess. And find her I did. Actually, I transferred her from another one of my clients, who presented no challenge, and was underutilizing her skills. I’ll call the professional caregiver Mary. (Again, not her real name.) Over the years Mary not only endured the verbal slicing and dicing, bur also physical abuse, including kicking, biting, scratching, slapping and punching from Debby. It came at bath time, but at other times as well. Mary took to wearing protective gear and gloves at bath time especially. Through all of this, plus the houseman’s nose being out of joint having to share power with another person in the household, she persisted. She stayed with Debby to the end, and was there when Debby took her last breath. Mary is my hero forever, period.
Probably, the most amazing thing in this saga is, in the last year and a half of Debby’s life, her personality changed completely. It happens to some people with Alzheimer’s or another dementia. Debby became sweet, relatively quiet, thoughtful, in other words, nice. On her deathbed, she used to tell Mary and me that she was so glad that she was friends with us. She said that she had put us in her will (she hadn’t) and that she would split her estate between Mary, me, and her son, (again, not true.). She would tell both Mary and I that we were pretty and that she loved us over and over again. Yes, she kept her verbal abilities, all the way up to the end. I used to get tickled when on her deathbed, she would correct my grammar and pronunciation. And she was mostly right!
I miss her a lot. And Mary was so devastated at her death that she got out of the caregiving field entirely, going back to her previous profession. Mary and I still are friends, and will be going out to lunch together now and then.
No, I will never forget Debby. All the bad and all the good. May she rest in peace.