I knew that I'd have a specialist in here today.
Larry Wishard is my good friend from Aurora, Colorado.
Been afflicting those people out there with his
preaching for a number of years now.
So I hope you're not recording all this. This
is the equivalent of clearing your throat
before you speak.
You've got to pass out papers and everything.
I've been telling those who have been here for
the first couple of hours today,
I've been asking them what in the world are you
doing here with this beautiful day.
And so many different nice classes you have
come to talk about caring for people and
serving people.
My hat, I said my hat and part of my hair is
off to you, those of you who are here serving,
being concerned about things like that.
I particularly wanted to go to this class at 11.
I had trouble getting back here at 11 because
they were talking about how to be grandparents.
Yes, Michael O'Donnell was talking about grandparenting.
And I promised my wife that I'd work this in at
every hour that she will be a grandmother this
summer twice for the first time.
Twice for the first time. Well, no, once for
one time. Right.
You were sharp enough to pass out the papers,
but you didn't.
I've got to say some things about books. I
haven't given you a bibliography and I need to
say something about books.
This is one I found in the, I think they're
using this in a counseling class.
It's called A Gift of Hope. It's paperback,
it's cheap, $5.99.
And I haven't read it, but I have looked
through it and it looks like some of the things
we've been talking about here, crises.
And I think if they use it here at the school,
we can be kind of proud to own a copy.
So I got a copy and I think you're going to
like it. That's good. I think overall this will
be good.
Those of you who are, excuse me, V-E-N-I-N-G-A,
Robert L. Venenga, V-E-N-I-N-G-A, excuse me,
sounds like she's Italian maybe or something.
Okay, yes, Veneno. Looks good, looks good. I
was thumbing through it, looking at the
chapters and read the back.
You'll like it. Just visiting in general, there
is a little book called A Hospital Visitation
Manual, which I think I can say this guy's name.
Biddle, yes, Perry Biddle, Perry H. Biddle Jr.
And this just has some good, I think, for
instance, just a list of things to do and not
to do when you visit.
And sometimes we make some real big blunders, I
think, trying to do good and visit people,
especially in the hospital.
And this is written for chaplains or ministers,
but you can just pretend that you're a
minister, because you are anyway.
They'll probably use the word pastor in here,
but if you're an elder that'll work for you too.
An all purpose book. Let's see, I like these
three books right here.
Good Grief, we talked about having grieving and
problems. Westburg, Granger Westburg, I think
this is out in third or fourth edition.
This is an older one. I can tell because the
guy has on plastic glasses on the back.
You know you're looking at the third. Westburg,
yeah, Good Grief, How to Help the Hurting.
And this is a popular book. Everett
Worthington, Worthington.
And are we getting this now? Yes.
And The Compassionate Visitor.
Like I said, I'm preaching to the choir these
last couple of hours, understanding that I have
people in here who obviously care,
because you've come in here this beautiful day
when there are lots of other classes.
Obviously you care, and it might be that you
could go home and encourage others to care and
to visit and to make good visits.
The Compassionate Visitor Becker, Death and the
Caring Community.
This is an old one. I think it's still in print.
Death and the Caring Community.
Richards and Johnson, Larry Richards and Paul Johnson.
Death and the Caring Community, Ministering to
the Terminally Ill.
And here's one that's been, I think, reprinted.
William Barkley, who wrote the little Barkley's
Daily Study Bible.
Those of you who have commentaries. This is a
book of prayers.
You'll find on the back of the last couple of
pages I have stolen, lifted some prayers from
William Barkley.
And these are prayers that sometimes I really
don't know exactly what to pray for whenever I
visit people in the hospital.
Those who are terminally ill, those who have
serious problems.
And it helps me to read some prayers. I would
just suggest you study some prayers.
And of course ask the person, what would you
like me to pray for? Sometimes they'll tell you.
But this is a good little book. William
Barkley, Prayers for Help and Healing.
Any questions over the books? Venenga, right?
Venegas, anyway.
My mother used to know me. She really did. Up
until just a couple of years ago.
Now she knows that I'm somebody special.
And when I come around, she knows it's really
good to have me around.
And she knows that I ought to brighten up her
day, and so she brightens up.
And she realizes that she's probably got a lot
invested in me, although I don't know what she
thinks about that.
But she just can't quite call my name.
And she'll say, I know your face, but I just
can't put a name to it.
The reason this is true is because she knows
Dennis Crawford, her son, as the Dennis
Crawford he was back when he was about like this.
Those of you remember how I used to go around
your uncles and your aunts and they'd say,
I didn't expect you to be, I knew you back when
you were here.
And I used to hate that, really, because of
course I hadn't seen him for a long time, but
it always made me feel rather small.
My mother knows the Dennis Crawford that she
bore almost 49 years ago now, but only as a child.
And one of the things when I tried in the last
couple of years, last year, when I would try to
tell her who I was,
and when I could almost see a little bit of
maybe insight into there, she would keep asking
me now, how old are you?
And she saw me as that little boy.
And so it may not be real easy, and I see her
slipping away more and more.
And there'll probably come a day when I'll go
to see my mother and she won't even know that
I'm somebody special.
And that really hurts, because your mother,
what I always knew is I could go home to Mama.
And that person that I was most special to in a
selfish way, I'm thinking of this, has gone.
And yeah, I've got a wife, and she's almost as
patient as my mother.
Maybe she's picked it up from her, I don't know.
But I have a wife, but that woman that loved me
and had to take me home, and I'd show up on the
back porch,
in the middle of the morning, and she wouldn't
ask me where I'd been the night before.
She'd let me come home anyway, kind of like the
prodigal son.
She's gone, really.
She hasn't died.
She's not dead.
She's still alive.
In fact, that's one of the things that really
hurts about Alzheimer's.
I don't know how you say, I say Alzheimer's.
A lot of people say Alzheimer's.
Is it harassment or harassment?
I don't know. Alzheimer's.
Whatever it is, it's bad, isn't it?
Alois, I believe, is his name. Alzheimer's.
Wouldn't you like to have a disease named after you?
Lou Gehrig's disease.
All those bad names.
Seems like the worst.
Chaney-Stokes breathing, that's bad, too, isn't it?
You've got all this kind of...
I wouldn't want to be a medical researcher
because they'd name something like that after me.
The thing about Alzheimer's is it's this
funeral that just keeps on going.
It never ends.
And you look at my mother, you've got the poem
there that I wrote.
I noticed it's kind of rough.
It's pretty gutsy.
But I think it kind of summed up what I have
said here in the notes, maybe in a more
emotional way.
What is the problem?
Who has folks now with Alzheimer's or some kind
of symptoms like that?
Who's working with older people?
I guess we all do, don't we?
Anybody feeling a little bit sick that's in here?
I think I got it every once in a while because
I forget.
That's why they put the name tag on me today.
There's about four million people, they say.
That's the nurses in here.
They may be able to upgrade me on this.
But I got this off of the Internet just a
couple of days ago, so it's probably hot.
About four million people in the United States
may be afflicted with Alzheimer's.
This is up from two and a half million in 1970.
Probably we're doing maybe some better
reporting of it.
I'm not sure that it's up.
Maybe we're living longer.
I go around people and they say a lot of people
are dying from cancer lately.
It must be something in the water or something
in the atmosphere.
We think that may be about Alzheimer's.
It could be maybe because we're drinking out of
aluminum cans or something like that.
But it also could be we're living a lot longer,
aren't we?
We're living a lot longer.
Sometimes our bodies outlive our minds,
sometimes it's vice versa.
We're living a lot longer now.
Maybe we're giving those diseases time to catch
up with our bodies and our minds
that normally wouldn't have back around the
turn of the century
when people didn't live nearly as long as we do now.
Maybe we're taking too good a care of ourselves.
But there's a lot of people, and we all know someone,
and we're all concerned about this sort of thing.
I'm glad you're here today.
We don't know a lot about Alzheimer's.
There's a lot to learn.
In fact, when you start talking about the brain,
we don't know very much about it anyway.
We don't know how it works.
The little nerve neurons and the synapse,
they kind of spark across those and you think
about things
and you put together people that you knew.
How do you recognize people?
How do you know that's your mother?
How do you know that's your father or that's
your wife?
We really don't even know that about it.
But something starts happening in the mind that
gums up the area between the synapse
so the electrical charge cannot jump across.
Nobody knows. It's called plaque. It's just a
covering there.
Nobody knows what causes that.
And actually it's impossible to diagnose.
We call something dementia. We call maybe TIA.
What else? Hardening of the arteries.
We've had all these words.
Alzheimer's disease.
But really it's hard to diagnose.
It's difficult to diagnose Alzheimer's.
I was so appreciative, and those in the medical community
can understand maybe I took my mother
back when we were trying to get a diagnosis of
her condition
to have a CT Scan or MRI, I believe it was.
And we were taken in to the MRI room by this
wonderful lady
who let us watch what was going on and let us
go in and talk to my mother
and reassure her because that thing is loud and
it's scary.
And so she let us go in there and she let us
watch, my wife and I,
what was going on.
And she made me feel so human and like I was a
part of the process.
And she made me feel like, you know, my mother too,
she was going to ask her how she was doing and
talk to her.
I just appreciated that. I wrote her a letter.
That was in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
I wrote a letter all the way back to Hot Springs
telling her that I hope that she was well paid,
but that she probably wasn't paid enough.
And that I really appreciated the fact that
even in this era of machines
that make a lot of racket and things that make
us feel like
maybe we're just numbers, you know, on a computer,
she really made us feel good.
And even though when we looked at the Scan, she said,
yeah, probably I don't see any tumor, I don't
see anything.
She was just kind of giving us off the cuff remarks.
She said, probably Alzheimer's.
And I said, yeah, that's probably what it is.
And I wrote her back and I said, we're going to
have to live with my mother
and we're going to continue to love and care
for her.
But you really made our time in the hospital
and our time together
and this painful time for us learning this well
worth getting to know you.
And I even wrote, and I'm not a kind of guy
that does this sort of thing a lot,
but I even wrote the director of the hospital.
I told him to raise her salary.
And I'm sure he did that.
But it's things like this, the human contact.
Sometimes, you know, brothers and sisters,
there is not a lot we can do
physically to help each other.
You know, when they say it's cancer and it's
all over and it's bad,
there's not a lot we can do.
Do I pray for people like that?
Yes, I pray for people like that.
But sometimes what we do is love each other and
have compassion.
Remember we talked about that, the schplankner term?
You're hurting your gut.
You have compassion.
In Matthew 9, Jesus saw the people that were
following him
and how they were scattered like sheep without
a shepherd.
And the Bible says he had compassion on them.
And the word used there is, I think in Arkansas
they'd call it lights, wouldn't they?
Your lights.
He was moved with compassion.
And sometimes that's all you can do is love people.
Try to understand them, listen to them, pray
for them, help their family.
Many times the medical community says what you
do is you make the diagnosis
and you get pretty close.
My mother, they call it dementia.
This means you're losing your mind.
You make the diagnosis and you treat the family.
And that's what we also do in the Christian community.
What is it about Alzheimer's that's so, it's
that we don't want to hear that, do we?
We don't want to hear Alzheimer's.
That just seems like a terrible thing.
And I would rather have heard my mother, I
would rather have heard cancer.
My dad died from cancer in August 13th of last year,
just a couple of months after we put her in the
nursing home.
And this is a phenomenon that often happens.
The caregiver, and my dad was 83, who had
knocked himself out day and night,
he was up with her 18 times a night, 18-20
times a night.
She would get up, wander around the house,
check the stoves, check for gas.
Her thing was, most Alzheimer's patients or
dementia patients
are kind of fixate on obsession.
And her obsession was that she smelled a gas escaping.
She smelled gas escaping.
And 18 times a night she would get up.
My dad finally broke him down.
He kept us from just knowing how bad she was
for a couple of years.
I could tell that he was kind of lonesome
because he'd call me on Sunday afternoon,
got to be a regular thing, he'd talk for an hour,
and he hardly ever did that before mother got
so bad.
But he just didn't have anybody to talk to.
And so he called and we'd talk.
I should have known at that time something was
going on.
But he hid from the rest of the family really
how bad she was
and kind of covered for her and didn't tell us
that he was up all night.
And finally his health broke.
And that's not unusual for something like that
to happen.
The one who's caring for the dementia patient
wears himself out.
And he died just a couple of months after we
put her in the nursing home,
from the doctor said, from Hodgkin's, no,
non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, something like that.
But it is a living, that's why we hate to hear
it, because it's kind of a living death.
It is a never-ending funeral.
One book I didn't tell you about, this is on Alzheimer's.
In fact, I didn't give you any Alzheimer's.
Let me do this right now, because I forget.
And Anna's covering for me, too.
The best book, the best book is The 36-Hour Day.
Nancy Mace.
Does anybody know David and Vera Mace?
These were Catholic who were into marriage enrichment.
And they were really old and died a couple of
years ago, I think.
But that name sounds weird.
Nancy Mace and Peter R-A-B-I-N-S. Rabbins.
Is that Mace with C or Mace? M-A-C-E.
M-A-C-E is I'm going to hit you in the head
with it.
That kind of Mace.
That's the best.
This is just, I mean, from start to finish, you
can tell it's OK.
When I got this, my mother was somewhat into
her disease.
And you look at it and you say, yeah, that's her.
We should have understood that.
I wish I'd had this book earlier.
I probably wouldn't have read it, because I
didn't need to.
But that is the best.
Now, one that has been that is otherwise good
is, I think, just across the board, it's elder care.
Elder care.
Timothy Smick. S-M-I-C-K.
Timothy Smick.
And this is not old, but 1990.
It should still be in print.
And this is the one that everybody's talking about.
Living in the Labyrinth.
Diana McGowan. M-C-G-O-W-I-N.
I read just about this whole thing last night.
It's short.
But Diana has Alzheimer's.
Early onset, it's called.
About 45, she was.
And she began writing this.
And it's her, she has more insight.
And the doctors are looking at her and saying,
how did this happen?
Because here's a woman who's going through it,
and she is, she has some insight to talk about it.
And can see that.
And so that's something, this gets us into the
mind, I think, of the Alzheimer's patient
better than any other book.
You really kind of see what's going on.
And you can live it with her.
If you can stand it.
But it's good.
Those of us who want to understand what is happening.
This McGowan book is really good. Excuse me?
Living in the labyrinth, L-A-B-Y, labyrinth.
A labyrinth is a maze.
Twist backs and turns.
In fact, it's called a personal journey through
the maze of Alzheimer's.
Everybody's giving it great reviews.
And all of the support groups.
Right now, in the congregation, probably, I'm
thinking of those even who are older,
what, ten people that are somehow afflicted
with some kind of dementia.
And some are just kind of going into it.
I'm looking at the two that are there to kind
of help me.
Some are deeply into dementia.
Others are just starting.
And so, I would just say we need to understand it.
We need to get a group of people who can
understand it and love and assist those.
Yes, Ma'am.
It would have helped me respond in a more, in a
better way to my mother.
I didn't know how to take some of the things
she was doing.
Even though I've had some training and
counseling and have worked with people for a
long time,
I've never been right in the face of somebody
that was demented and had to,
well, you just don't get ready to deal with
your folks like that.
I could deal with anybody else.
But I would have been more informed, maybe, and
gotten some insight into her thinking.
One of the things that are mentioned in the
phase of Alzheimer's is this catastrophic reaction.
You want to live around the Alzheimer's
patient, so you will not evoke this
catastrophic reaction,
which is usually a fit of some kind.
I would have to physically restrain my mother,
and I was afraid that the poem says she's bruised.
I was afraid one of the reasons that we had to
put her into a psychiatric nursing facility
is just to kind of get her over one of her
catastrophic moments.
I probably would not have, we live in Austin, Texas.
She lived in Glenwood, Arkansas.
My father was ill with this undetermined
disease of edema.
It looked like maybe he was dying, and he could
not take care of her.
So we took her to our home in Austin.
Bad move.
I think if I had read The 36th Hour a Day, I
probably wouldn't have tried that.
So I can just share with you some of my goofs.
I saw this idyllic sort of thing where I'd
bring my mother, get her out of that situation
up there,
and she would be better and feel better, and
we'd just have fun and make brownies.
And I literally had to hold her in the car the
last 60 miles of the trip.
We drove her car, it was bigger, Cadillac, it
was nicer, and my wife was traveling behind us
in our car.
And about Waco, this temple, Waco, one of those
I forgot that too.
We stopped at 4:00. Another bad move.
We stopped at 4:00.
And all the way I was telling her from Arkansas
to Texas to Dallas, wherever, we're in this
town now,
we're going through, I was trying to kind of
bring her along so she wouldn't get to my house
and say,
you know, we're at my house, and not know where
she was.
So everywhere I would say, we're in Dallas now,
and look at the big buildings.
She said, yeah, I'm glad I'm not going to stay here.
And all the time she was thinking, I'm going home.
And I kept telling her, you're going to my house.
We stopped to get some ice cream.
Enjoyed the ice cream, got back in the car. She
said, where are we going?
I said, don't you remember? Silly boy. Of
course she didn't remember.
Don't you remember? You're going to my house,
and we're going to spend some time down there
because Dad's sick.
And she said, I'm not going to your house.
I think she was talking to me like I used to
talk to her as a little kid, you know, rebelling.
I'm not going to your house.
And I said, yeah, we'll stay a few days. You'll
enjoy it. It'll be OK.
And she started trying to open the door.
And see, I provoked, not necessarily by telling
her where we were going,
but I think by the fact of taking her away from
her house into a catastrophic reaction.
And you listen to Alzheimer's people, I said,
that's the worst thing you can do.
And I lived it. I lived it for an hour and a
half, holding her in the car, fending off her blows,
and trying to keep her from unbuckling the seat
belt to get out.
I'm not sure, I kept asking her, could she even
open the door because of wind resistance if she
had been able to open the door.
But I kept the electric lock over here down so
she couldn't open the door.
But she did. I didn't have a lock on the window.
And she did let the window down. And every time
we'd pass the truck.
Aspects of crisis, which is so scary, we're
talking about ministering people in crisis,
is that you did not expect to be there.
You know, we call it an appointment if you
expect to be there.
If you didn't expect to be there, it's a crisis.
You don't know what you're going to do.
You just arrived there. And without any other,
you have run out of resources.
That's another thing I did. Like I say, I've
been preaching and ministering to people for 20 years,
but I had run out of resources trying to
minister to my mother.
And so that would just have been one resource
that I probably would not have made some
mistakes that we had.
Any other questions? You can stop me. I said in
the first hour, stop me.
I'll rephrase your question so we'll get it on
the tape and we'll talk about it. Yes.
Well, you know, there's a lot for things other
than Alzheimer's.
I hate to talk medically here, but if the
carotid arteries are clogged up, if there's
some other,
I mean, there's some reversible things that
depression even can mask or depression can be
seen as maybe dementia.
Older folks, a lot of times we say they're
demented whenever they just need maybe some
antidepressant or whatever,
something to work with. Yes, things like that.
Alzheimer's cannot be reversed as far as we
know right now.
There's one drug at least called Cognex. I
think it's the name. Is that Cognex?
But it is. It's murder on your liver and it
doesn't help very many people.
And the doctors that I dealt with, my mother,
they just, they didn't want to try it.
But there's nothing right now for Alzheimer's
as such.
Of course, Alzheimer's again is one of those
things you don't, you can't really diagnose
until the autopsy.
It's too late.
But that, yes, yes.
Unless you sort of know the history of the
person, sometimes you can get Alzheimer's mixed
up with some kind of medication.
Was it too much medication maybe or a long time medication?
Right, if people can be over-medicated, older
folks, especially in nursing homes, sometimes
they tend to pump them up.
Don't quote me on that, but sometimes they tend
to, they're easier to handle whenever.
And I can understand now after having one
person in my home.
Because Anna had to stand at the back door, I
had to stand at the front door to keep her in.
So yeah, but you can misread also medical, you
can just be over-medicated and memory loss,
impairment, motor impairment, can't walk.
And that happens, yeah.
Also, this disease affects people in many ways.
You can't just say, this is the fact of all
kinds of ways of knowing that that person is
not being maybe calm and just don't remember things.
It's not very calm.
Yeah, it's hard to say exactly how people are
going to act.
They respond to dementia much as we respond to
things personality type-wise.
One of the things we first noticed in my
mother, and this happens in a lot of
Alzheimer's patients, is a change in personality.
My mother used to be a real fun lady and loved
to play games and I could joke with her and she
would understand.
And we look at this now in retrospect and see
this is easier to see after some time has passed.
Ten years has passed and we see how she's
changed over the years.
And now we know there is dementia.
We can look back and say, okay, yeah, I know
why she was doing that now because she was at
the first stages of this disease.
She took things I said literally and if I told
her something I would joke, we would joke about
things and we'd laugh.
But one day I joked and she got very angry.
Just a response that was not like her at all.
And so I know now looking back on it, this was
the beginning of that sort of thing.
Eight years ago, ten years ago, something like that.
But yeah, it's hard to say.
Again, back to TIAs and little strokes and
things like that affect different parts of the brain.
So you don't know whether some person might
have a problem with motor activity, another
thinking or emotion, frontal lobe. Yes.
You think it's becoming almost the reason the
numbers maybe have gone so high is they just
put more people in that group?
You mean it may be over diagnosed now?
Again, I'm right about this.
Nothing has come up to diagnose Alzheimer's.
Okay, autopsies have confirmed diagnosis.
We worked with a psychiatrist and you hear both
the ends of the thing.
Sometimes the medical community, kind of like
the church, cannot agree with itself sometimes.
So you talk to some people and they tell you
different things.
But some would say there's a long, long onset
to Alzheimer's and others would say no, if it's
a long, long onset it's something else.
So I heard both ends of that from psychiatrists
when we were talking about my mother. Yes.
How to deal with, well I don't know, just be
aware that that's always under the surface and
can happen.
It can have one of these catastrophic responses.
I tried to just change my mother's, get her
attention to something, distract.
Probably told a lot of lies early on that I
wouldn't tell again.
I would probably shoot straighter with her.
I would have to tell her whatever it took to
get her to take her medicine to sleep at night.
And until you had to stay up at night with
somebody wandering around, you don't know
exactly how you're going to react to that.
But you begin to tell them whatever.
She got to wear, and this is another thing,
junk food is all she wanted.
Yarnell's ice cream, which is in Arkansas, and
chocolate syrup.
And boy, we lived it up for a few days while we
were there.
We had chocolate syrup and ice cream every time.
But we'd put those pills inside her ice cream.
Just do whatever it takes to do that.
So you do whatever it takes again to not invoke
one of these catastrophic responses.
And about the cursing and all, I tried to get
my mother distracted.
Oh, it's awful.
It hurts to be hit by your mother.
I mean, worse than it did when I got the peach
tree tea.
Because I wasn't as aware then, and I know I
really needed it.
And maybe probably some of the licking she gave
me after she got sick I needed too.
But that's one of the hardest parts of it, is
having to physically restrain somebody.
And again, I can do that with you.
I can do whatever we need to do with you today.
But your own mother is just something.
You lose that objectivity that I've always had
in ministering
and being there in situations where you take control.
Maybe that's the reason a lot of doctors and
surgeons don't like to treat their own families.
You kind of lose that objectivity that you need
to do whatever needs to be done.
So that was real hard.
How you react to those catastrophic reactions.
And it's almost like, well, as I said in this
and you read over and over again in other kinds
of literature,
you change places, you really become the parent.
And the parent becomes the child.
And nobody told me how to do that.
I went to all kinds of seminars and things,
ACU, Harding, everywhere about parenting.
And managed to get our kids mostly normal.
I didn't get into any of those seminars where
they told you how to raise your parents.
That's right.
What do you feel the most guilt about in
dealing with this?
What do I feel the most guilt?
I suppose not reacting in the right ways maybe
to her catastrophic responses.
All I did was restrain her, but you just kind
of feel bad about that.
Another thing, you just hate to make, I've
always been the kind of guy
who wanted to make people happy and not cause
any problems and to have everybody feeling great.
You say, what are you doing preaching?
See, I can suspend that sort of thing for a while.
So it's hard for me to tell an 81-year-old
woman what to do and make her unhappy
and force her to do something that's really...
I'd hate to leave the nursing home and have her
calling after me, take me home.
Mercifully, those things get better.
She is now into what's going on in the nursing
home and things are okay.
Yes, Ma'am?
I was in a similar situation with my mother 11
months ago.
We moved her to Tennessee to appellate her.
I dreaded doing it because she'd always think
we didn't want to come and appellate her.
There were no trees.
She was getting up and going to move here.
When the time came, I was really dreading
bringing her out here,
but the way we did it was in a hospital for evaluation.
I went to her house and I packed up as much of
her things as I could.
The plan was to take her from the hospital, put
her in a car,
take her to the airport and get on the plane
and come this way.
It went pretty smooth, but we missed the first flight
because she knew something was up when we all
met at the hospital.
We explained the two issues of coming here,
appellating, and stayed for a while.
My brother, it took a little long because we
had planned it all up to the minute.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
She got into an argument with my brother, so
that delayed us into the airport.
I rang him in to try to get in the hold of the
flight, but we missed it.
We finally got her out of the car and into the airport.
We got a few times not getting a hold of her,
so we had a wheelchair.
I knew she couldn't run away, so you know, I
threw her out.
You know, I threw her out.
Whether it's that or my favorite, she can't
just run away.
We got to the airport and we told her, well,
let's get something to eat.
She kind of calmed down.
She calmed down while we waited for the next flight,
but then when it came time to get out of the wheelchair,
go down the ramp, get on the airplane.
She was saying pretty long ago, but my brother
was getting her down,
and we got on the airplane.
He got down, and he kind of relaxed, and he
asked his brother, he said,
this is a big bus. How many people in this bus
own one?
And he said, it's as good as a big bus.
When he looked at me, I just put down a smile,
you know,
you know, I do well here for you, but you got
to have a laugh.
It was fairly smooth, and what about when you
got home to your flight?
Well, it still went pretty much okay,
but every now and again, right away, you'd say,
well, I've got to go home.
It was late at night, and I'd say, well, it's
pretty late.
Why don't you just rest, you know, lay down the
bed for a while,
and tomorrow we'll see what we can do.
And she'll do that from time to time,
but by the next morning she would die, so.
Yeah, I found myself, you're living,
you're living almost the next 15 seconds.
You know, we can just get through this 15 seconds,
and we'll get through another 15 seconds,
and hey, we were taught to live a day at a time,
but you know, we live maybe a lot shorter
periods of time with that.
But yeah, once you convince your mother to do something,
it's not like she is logical and is convinced,
but you have to do that over and over and over again,
which is one of the maddening things, I think,
of this.
For instance, when my dad died, we didn't tell
my mother that he had died.
She didn't go to the funeral.
I was afraid of a catastrophic reaction.
I have heard of a couple of funerals that were
really, really bad
because of Alzheimer's mates that were in the audience.
So we just didn't tell her.
And then I really felt guilty about that.
But then I got to thinking about this.
If I had told her, I would have had to tell her
again and again and again
and again and whatever.
I told her 15 seconds later, 30 wouldn't have
mattered anyway.
So that's really a blessing in that way.
I didn't want one of her last memories to be
that of my dad's death.
And the rest of the family concurred with that.
I don't know whether that was the right thing
to do or not.
But again, for the next 15 seconds, it's the
right thing anyway.
Yes, Sir?
I appreciate your response.
Sometimes during service, things seem to go
fairly well.
There are times when she recognizes her
husband, times when she doesn't.
But when she is out of it and doesn't, she can
revert back into a very terminated state.
And I was just wondering what advice you might
give as members of the congregation
for helping this family and working with her.
Would you encourage her to continue to attend it?
My mother was always quiet in church.
She knew all the words to the song.
She still knows.
In fact, she still knows how to play pitch.
You know how to play pitch?
Cards, 52, deck of cards, pitch.
You play 42 in Texas.
In Arkansas, they play pitch.
It's about the same thing, only it's with spot cards,
those sinful things in Texas.
Yeah, it's with spot cards.
See, we thought dominoes were sinful in
Arkansas when I was growing up.
But where was I?
Yeah, I'm trying to evade the question.
Maybe I can talk it out.
My mother was quiet in the proper places.
I'm not sure, now unmedicated, that she would
be quiet.
I would probably want to talk to the family and
just see,
what do you think, maybe after one of the
disruptions or something.
I'm a believer that usually Christians can sit
down and talk about things.
Logic, well, unless they have Alzheimer's.
But talk to the family and just see what they think.
It might be that this man would just be
relieved if you brought it up
so I've just been wondering how to handle this.
I'm glad you'd understand if she stayed home or
somebody stayed with her or whatever.
I don't know.
One thing about this, again, so maddening, it's
like other problems we have.
There's not any real pat answers to them.
We can't go to the book and say, okay, here it is.
Second Excedrin 5.3 says, do this.
Well, we haven't gotten over this material yet.
Yeah, we have.
When a parent was in this thing, did they go
back, instead of in the present,
but she doesn't know that, but she recalls,
brings back people when she was a child
or when she was on the farm.
I mean, we're talking 50 years ago.
I'm not exactly why physiologically this is.
Why did they revert back so far back in the
past and not really known in the present?
I'm not sure. It has something to do with, I
don't know, brain, the way it's put together.
Who knows? Yes.
That's with other kinds of memory loss, too,
and not just Alzheimer's.
Other kinds of memory loss, that happens, too.
It's just a phenomenon. It happens.
My mother would look every evening.
This is called sundowning.
My mother, every evening, about four or 5:00,
would start looking for her mother and dad to
come and pick her up.
She was looking at a time back when they were
young and she was young.
That's one of the lost things, I think, about being.
I've tried to put myself, and I'm a real
sensitive guy.
I mean, I try to imagine to a guy.
I try to think, what would it feel like to be
every moment just maybe in a different world?
I think we talk about losing things when we
lose parents.
We think, what are they losing?
A mind is a terrible thing to lose, isn't it?
I illustrate this in a couple ways to myself.
I don't know if this may work out.
Have you ever, lately, been visiting somewhere,
maybe in a motel,
maybe at a friend's house overnight, and you
wake up in the morning
and don't know where you are?
I don't mean for an hour.
I mean, for the first five seconds after you
open your eyes, you think,
this is not my bedroom, where am I?
But you realize how terrible you feel for five
seconds when you're figuring out where am I?
That's kind of the way I see the pain of Alzheimer's.
If I woke up right now and didn't realize I was
teaching this class and I just woke up,
who are you people? What are you doing? What am
I doing here?
I try to put myself, when you get the feeling
really bad about the person,
that you think about and losing them, realize
also what they're losing
and the pain that they're going through, too.
Take this material home. Get the prayers on the back.
I think those are good. Read some books about Alzheimer's.
We mostly just kind of shared feelings today,
but I guess that's okay.
Yes, Sir?
They would hallucinate seeing other men in the house.
Oh, yeah.
And they would accuse the wife when she said no
one's there for hiding these men from you.
And it got real ugly. How do you deal with that?
I didn't deal with it, but my mother, she would
always, we would always have a little girl with us.
And I think maybe she was thinking about Anna.
I was worried about my mother. It was really
maddening that she smelled gas, natural or
butane gas.
This is a phenomenon. See, I didn't know that again.
If I'd read Thirty-Six Hour Day, I would have known.
Oh, yeah, this is common. It's good to know
that it happens to other people, too.
But I had to rescue her from, she had space
heaters, and she was standing on her head with
her legs up one day.
Down behind, she'd fallen down and stuck
herself head first down trying to smell gas.
And so we had to laugh. Let's laugh together.
I just had to pick her up, and I couldn't move
the stove because she thought, oh, Honey, no,
it's really going to escape then.
I couldn't move the stove. I had to hold the
stove and pull her out at the same time.
And there's a couple of things. If we had time,
I'd tell you about the pound of flour.
But call me up and I'll tell you about that.
But I don't know how to, excuse me.
Oh, no, that's not reasonable.
No, it makes people angry if they really
believe something to tell them, no, that's not true.
One man with this would tell me, he said one
day, I see two men sitting there beside you.
If you tell me they're not there, I'll believe
you. He wouldn't leave his wife again.
It's a real painful situation for a wife.
Yes, it is.
You try not to cause one of those catastrophic
relations, one of those reactions somehow.
The sundowner thing just happens the most demented.
You start calling in the kids and making sure
everything's OK and battening down the hatches
for the night
and doing your mental housekeeping, and that's
when it comes up.
When I was listening to him like that, with my
little mother, it was something that didn't
represent real danger to her.
You made up some stuff?
Yes, but then when it presents a real danger,
you're like, don't break it in, why don't you
do something about it?
I finally had to start telling my mother, I
don't think they live in an old house with a
crawl space underneath.
I'd say, mother, I think you're smelling a
musty smell that comes up from under the house.
That would sometimes work and other times it wouldn't.
Those were times that she would get violently angry.
Why doesn't people see it my way?
Let's pray together.
Father, thank you for the time that we've had today.
Just maybe sharing some feelings and some
common experiences and seeing some experiences
that others have.
It's been good to be here.
Help us as Christians to be the kind of people
that we ought to be, especially in helping
others who are going through these kinds of problems.
Father, we don't know hardly any answers to
what to do about these things, but we pray that
you'd give us wisdom.
And as James told us, that we might pray for
your wisdom, that we might persevere through
our problems and that knowing what you've told
us about that will be better at the end.
Help us to grow, Father, through the things
that we experience.
Help us, as Paul said, to be able to comfort
others with the comfort that we have received
when we have been comforted by you.
Father, everyone in this class today, this
afternoon, bless them, especially in their
problems with those that they know who are demented.
Having problems, especially those that we're
Kin to, mothers, fathers, grandmothers.
You'd bless them and give them your wisdom and
your peace that passes all understanding.
Father, we don't know a lot of answers to the
things that happen in this life, but we know
that we have a home in Heaven with you.
We know that even right now we taste eternal life.
And so we just ask you to help us and encourage
us with this whenever the days are long,
whenever we get tired, and whenever we need
your encouragement that you'll give it to us,
as you promised.
Help us, Father, to have a good day now, the
rest of the day, and a good night.
We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Thank you for coming.