Role Reversal in the Art of Caregiving

I get off the elevator on the third-floor memory care unit of my mother's facility armed with strong resolve and a plastic baggie filled with Golden Oreos. I will no doubt need both.

I start the routine of looking for my mother. Sometimes she is sitting in one of the upright chairs—the kind you might find in a formal living room—facing the elevator. But today the only one occupying the chair is a slim, well-dressed man with a gray mustache.

I nod to him and turn right to go in the common area of the floor. The residents are all sitting in a silent circle. The TV is on, but no one seems to be paying attention. I spot my mother three chairs in and wave to her. She looks at me blankly.

"Hi, Ginny," I say.

I no longer call her "Mom" as she doesn't seem to recognize that name (or me), so I've started calling her by her first name. She responds better to that than "Mom," which I suppose is appropriate—her role as my mother is gone.

"Guess what?" I say, way overenthusiastically. "I'm going to take you outside today."

She stares at me for a few seconds, as if trying to process this. "No," she says. "I want to stay here."

It's ironic that she doesn't want to leave the place where she lives, as there was a time she disliked it so much she tried to escape. The kind of escape where alarms go off and the staff panics and you're automatically moved to the locked third floor.

"Come on," I coax, "it will be fun." She just shakes her head.

We're three weeks into a potassium crisis. My mother's levels are much lower than they should safely be. This situation has required increased doses of potassium pills and weekly blood checks.

My mother likes neither.

So I am here for our weekly trek to the lab.

The first week she went with me happily, obediently holding my hand as I led her off the elevator and out the front door into the sunshine. "This is going to be fun," she remarked, having no clue where we were going or what was going to happen to her. "We can only hope," I said to myself silently.

The next week I was not as successful. When I went up to get her, she refused to go with me. I pulled the Oreos out of my purse and waved the bag in front of her. "Look what I have," I say. "Come on. We'll eat one in the elevator." She definitely wanted the cookie, but she didn't want to leave. She sat defiantly on the overstuffed sofa in her room and told me to "just go on." I had to abort the mission and try again the next day.

Her mental state and the way I have to deal with her is much like that of a two-year-old. I redirect, distract, and yes, bribe. But unlike a stubborn toddler, I can't pluck her up and make her do anything she doesn't want to do.

My mother was diagnosed with semantic dementia in 2014. My parents were divorced, and my mother moved down to Atlanta to be nearer to me 20 years ago. So even though I have two brothers, the responsibility of caring for her fell to me.

The signs started appearing at least two years before her diagnosis. She would forget words and constantly repeat herself. At first, we chalked it up to the fact that she lived alone, was fairly isolated, and didn't have a lot of interaction with people. But then the signs got worse: she lost more of her communication skills, was unsure of where she was going when she was driving, had trouble writing checks and keeping her finances straight, and started cutting back on feeding herself (and her dog) because she thought she had no money.

I was also getting calls from her friends, who were noticing big...