Bringing Mom Home: A Thousand Heartbreaks

 Every book has some deleted scenes. Usually they're deleted because they're not that great. Sometimes they're redundant. The exchange below illuminated an uncomfortable fact about Mom: she had racist tendencies. Since she didn't often come in contact with people of other ethnicities, this was rarely evident. However, when she moved into assisted living, my sister and I had to reacquaint ourselves with this aspect of our mother and figure out how to deal with it. Simply put: it's hard enough to correct your own parent, and people with dementia just don't learn new things. Often, you just have to work around whatever their perceptions are.Here's the scene:Hospice assigns four people to each case: A registered nurse, a social worker, a home health aide, and a chaplain. Visiting Mom at Azure Skies, Claire meets Chaplain Kim. She tells him about my Chinese Bible study. He is interested, as he has spent some time in China as a missionary. Chaplain Kim asks Mom if he can pray for her, and she allows it. Claire reports to me:"After he left, Mom said some unkind things about him, which (I can't help it) hurt. I just wish I could reason with her. I was left wondering if she feels threatened by him somehow, or maybe feels afraid of what she perceives as his ‘other-ness,’ since he is Korean. You and I see people like him as a person with an interesting story to tell, but she didn't ask him anything about himself at all."And there's another thing: the perspective of people with dementia becomes increasingly narrow. Conversations are all about them, how they feel, what they want, and rarely about you. And that's just heartbreaking.