Dying While Dressed Wrong
Dementia has no fashion sense
I lost it the second I spotted her, perched on the edge of her bed.
I was laughing so hard I could barely talk. My hysterics prompted her to mimic me.
When I finally composed myself, she stopped laughing too. I then asked my mother if she knew what I found so funny.
“No, but I like laughing,” she said, as she laughed more, deepening her tone, as if imitating a man’s voice. She rocked back and forth.
She was wearing the most outrageous gold and black sweater dress. It was surely a relic of the early 1980s, and most definitely did not belong to her. It was form-fitting, short, involved some polyester, some shiny lame, and many gold threads. There were black lightning bolts sewn onto it, and into it somehow.
Just a few months earlier, I would have seethed, and stormed to the nurses’ station for an explanation. But I’d adjusted my expectations for nursing home care so many times by that point, I just found humor in the absurdity. She wasn’t upset, so I wasn’t going to be upset. Together we cackled.
But on the way home I broke, and sobbed like I did nearly every time I drove away, and left her there, untethered from anything she knew, this time dressed in someone’s 40-year-old dance club dress they threw…
