Christmas day found our family all split up in three different vehicles doing the hour drive back from a nearby campground. There was no internet to be had the three nights we were camping - I like it that way- but I had a post all planned about how nice it was that MIL's new anti-anxiety medicine has been working wonders for her happiness, and how she's inspired me to take up knitting again because she is knitting feverishly lately - albeit pretty erratically technically speaking.
I had hope for this happy post about our family having a cool holiday camping, and how it's all worth it for the moments when we're all together and enjoying each other's company. I want to be that person, and I want our situation to be that situation. And sometimes it is, but it wasn't this Christmas, and that's the truth, so that's what I'm writing.
When FIL came to get my husband, baby boy and I to haul us plus the camper to the camp ground, I offered to take MIL in the car with baby and I so that she and I could chat. Up until this trip, we have been able to joke with each other on trips in the car, and maybe there would be a few non-sequitur thoughts that surfaced, but nothing that I couldn't quickly turn back to a "normal" conversation by a joke or a distraction. This time was different, very very different.
Maybe it was a combination of the fact that she and FIL had already been camping for a few days, coupled with the progression of the Alzheimer's disease. She was fixated on telling me about how she had had a vision of mice and rats on the day that she thought she had a stroke. She said that the doctor asked her about what she saw, and told her that it was actually right on target because mice and rats are a sign of the end of the world coming. I tried my best to just listen. At one point in the car she said out of nowhere: "Water running off the edge of nowhere, and rats and mice running around everywhere..."
After we got to the campsite she continued persistently talking about how the world is running out of aluminium and we need horses and goats to roam all over to help bring the soil back. Each time she lost sight of FIL she thought that he was going to pick up someone from the airport, but when I asked her who, she couldn't quite figure out which friend or relative she was thinking of. The entire four days were taken up with these delusions, and anger. Finally, on Christmas Eve, we made a plan to bring her back home early. It was pretty clear that she can't handle the stress of being in a new place, especially showering and changing clothes in a new or different space. So, we opened gifts on Christmas Eve and had a nice meal with my own mom there too (thank Jesus). MIL talked about how some doctor or other told her she must get stung by a bee, or maybe a flea, to help her mild epilepsy get better (she doesn't have mild epilepsy).
And now we are home. MIL is laying on her bed quietly, where she has been for the last hour or so. I don't know what to make of what happened. It was the weirdest Christmas I have ever had. Alzheimer's is hard man. My family is awesome though.
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