Oliver: Creativity can help to ease some of the burdens of caregiving

Caregiving for someone with dementia often is an exercise in problem-solving. It’s like life, but on steroids.

Add to that the degrees of difficulty that come with the emotional, physical and mental strain brought on by the layers of grief that accompany watching a loved one fade before one’s eyes.

Many people understand that the undertaking is a noble one. The caregiver, however, can also tell you about the resentment, grief and guilt that come along, too.

A little creativity can go a long way to address at least some of those issues.

For instance, I found that figuring out a way to separate my dear husband, Tony, who has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, from the disease itself helped both him and me. When we named his illness Fred, we could both blame Fred for the troubling things that were happening to us.

We did this early on, when Tony was still aware that things weren’t quite right with him. He’d often call himself “stupid” when the issue was the effects of his illness. And I needed a way to be annoyed with the situation without taking it out on my best friend.

I’m not sure Tony really appreciates who Fred is anymore, but I do. And it still helps.

Creativity also helps when a caregiver is dealing with someone who is seeing things that aren’t there. I found myself in that situation when I was caring for my mother, who had vascular dementia.

I knew I was in for a wild ride when my mother informed me that bugs were crawling on her comforter. When I looked, I saw nothing. Then she said the bugs were flying in and out of the light fixture. Again, I dutifully looked but saw nothing.

Unless one has experience with dementia, the first reaction often is to correct and deny. “No, Mom, there’s nothing there.” The problem is that those bugs were real to my mother. To deny them just made her upset and angry.

A seminar taught me the value of creativity. If we acknowledge what our loved one is seeing and then use a little improv skill to direct the storyline, our person can calm down and move on.

I used to have to do that a lot with my mother. She would see “little people” who were always trying to get something from her. I would tell her that I’d talk to them or I’d leave something out for them if they needed it. Or when she’d need to go see her long-deceased mother in the middle of the night, I’d reassure her that we’d go see her in the morning. Mom never remembered it the next morning, and I was ready for the next crisis.

Recently, I was experiencing what one caregiver advocate called an “unspoken grief of dementia.” Having someone around with dementia means having to upend one’s home to accommodate them. In the later stages, one’s home can resemble a hospital with all the medical equipment.

However, it starts even sooner than that. For me, I spent several years with our second bedroom converted from an office into my mother’s room. That meant finding places for all the displaced furniture.

With Tony, it has meant moving all art objects that might be broken out of his line of vision and grasp. He and I picked out many of these things together on our travels, so they hold treasured memories for me. I’ve had to tuck things away or put them where he can’t get to them.

I do love to be surrounded by art, so it made me sad that I had empty spaces. They were a painful reminder of our heartbreaking dementia journey.

Again, creativity has been put to good use. Instead of feeling sad, I opted to take action.

My latest outing with my girlfriends was a trip to a couple of local thrift stores. In one, I hit the jackpot, landing several pieces of art that I could display even within Tony’s grasp. One was a hand-carved wooden basket that Tony can’t break, but he’s welcome to move around the house as the mood strikes him. Another was a turned wood vase that someone had picked up in a gallery in Colorado. It was just the sort of thing that Tony and I would have gotten on one of our vacations.

In the end, I have art objects on display. And Tony can touch them without getting a negative reaction.

I’d call that a win-win. Problem solved.

• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.