Haven't murdered eachother yet.
Had two nights of dinners -a-deux: the dried tofu and radish stew the first night and then simmered fish paste bits and veggies the second night. All ok. I certainly have more "Okaasan-type meals" in mind now than 3 years ago - and not having to plan lunches too is WHOLE weight off my mind.
Okaasan very chatty at dinners about a range of stuff - New Card lucky numbers and lottery numbers, and pets and wartime good shortages etc.....and we went several rounds on the fact that baseball star Darvish is/isn't Iranian but could conceivably be Japanese.....
Have to say it: Okaasan is far chattier when it is just her and me. Having Yujiro there are the table turns us both into his audience, which is relaxing for me and maybe not so stimulating for Okaasan.
Anyway. All ok.
I washed and dried all the laundry from her room and just marched in and returned it to her....with the excuse "It's hard to do so much by hand isn't it...etc".
Okaasan set off so late again in the day for a walk. It's is SO not a normal thing to do. I got home at 5.30 pm and she was fussing about not having any money....and then started ready.
Outside was dark and minus 6 C, the roads were icy, the night was horrible...and Okaasan decided it was a good time for a walk to the subway, then she took the subway downtown and maybe walked on the underground street to the station. And then came home by 7.30 pm.
Old ladies usually don't choose to go out on a cold and icy evening.....but..
Okaasan also says the mystery person rang the doorbell last night again. At 10 pm. From our second floor apartment we can't hear the doorbell, so I don't know. I was actually awake at 10 pm...but heard nothing.
Hmm. Really don't know whether this is true or not. There is no car in our parking space at the moment...so it is possible someone is testing to see if the house is empty or not....or could just be Okaasan's vivid imagination.
She got a bit snippy with me when I suggested it could be next door's bell she was hearing - "I can hear ok you know!!!"......
I moved stuff around on the doorstep this morning, so an observer can see that things are happening at the house...maybe I should put a trash bag full of beer cans outside so it looks like a beer-guzzling guy is inside!!
Dementia sufferers do apparently have hallucinations, but until now we haven't really thought that much about Okaasan.
Hard to know.
And so. Writing this at work on my laptop, it is too heavy to take to and fro....my thigh muscles yesterday were a bit sore and swollen from carrying heavy work books. And I needed to buy a daikon raddish ;-))
Not having a computer in the house!!! VERY liberating! I actually read the newspaper, watch TV for more than 5 minutes and do other things I should do...but don't.....shhhhh...I could of course make Okaasan's lunch...but let's not go there!!!
I wondered why you didn't post sooner.
ReplyDeleteThose daikon really do come between the blogger and the readers.
I remember a student of mine many years ago,(we were talking about Gone With The Wind) saying that it was a daikon that Scarlet pulled out of the soil. I was like, uh no.
Um, what else.
Hmm, very true that, this senile stuff, my grandmother aka Not-The-Grandmother (NTG for short), used to want to go out at the strangest of times.
I wonder why this is.
It's obviously common amongst people with alz.
It's like all the rebelling they wish they had done 'in life', starts to happen once they are with alz.
NTG was the straightest, sucking lemons, 'drinking a pint is not on', one sherry a day, I don't like chocolate or flowers, person there ever was, UNTIL she got alz, then she wanted to drink pints, bottles of sherry, loved flowers and chocolate, and all her stories were my stories, embellished...cycled the length of Britain, went round the world on a skateboard...that kind of thing...and I wonder why, and I wonder if folks who have repressed themselves throughout life, secretly wanting to be wild and wanton, wind up with alz more than folks like me, who are wild in life to begin with and won't be tamed.
Just a thought.
Yes, so sorry - sometimes daikon vs laptop choice...
ReplyDeleteLove the story of NTG liking all the fun stuff of life when she'd got alz. - yes, liberated from how she thought she was meant to behave maybe?!
I find it interesting that Okaasan was obviously a great cook in her day, but now can't remember how to at all - something she was so good at and probably enjoyed is all now slipped away - but she still watches cooking shows on Tv and reads magazines about cooking....
"Haven't murdered each other yet" What a great way to start a post. An entertaining and interesting look into a common "problem" in Japan. Mulitple generations in a single house. I look forward to more. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteHi Benjamin - nice to meet you in bloggysphere....a lot of this blog is just me letting off steam and being sarky...but I try to inject a level of social observation and thoughts into it...and then a wave of steam and sarcasm sweeps on in again...
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