The long kiss goodnight...

Today I left early to go visit mum in Sydney.
Traffic was bad and it took almost three hours to get there.
Mum has taken another slide down the rabbit hole and although she looked fine, clean, neat cared for it was very apparent that she had the attention span of a six year old.
She could only hold a thought for a moment and got very excited by my arrival. She wandered around and couldnt sit with me, looking for someone to tell something to but not being able to remember what it was that she was supposed to say. She would look at me and I could see her trying to put the puzzle together. She wandered in her mind from her teenage years to the war years to the early, early after her arrival in Australia.The here and now was something that was only visited for a minute at a time.
I asked staff how she was and was told that she has been causing problems with wandering in the middle of the night and embarrasing herself, staying in other people's rooms, taking their clothes and being inappropriate.
So a decision has had to be made to move her into a high care dementia ward.
Thank God that means only moving her down the hall and behind secured doors.
There the residents are all monitored and staff are trained to take care of dementia patients - where she is now is really still a general area and there are still residents there that have all their marbles, they are just old and frail.
This was very sad today.
I understand how Anchell feels - as much as you KNOW things are going to change for the worse you can NEVER be prepared enough for when you see it happen. There is always a part of you that wishes to remain ignorant in the hope that its just not going to happen, but it does.
Mum is a stranger to herself.
Whatever she believes is good enough for now - tomorrow things will be different and she will have forgotten again.
One day soon I will turn up and she will not know who I am, and when that happens it will be very, very sad, but it WILL happen and I will just have to come to terms with it.
The most important thing is that she is being taken care of, she is eating and seems to drift in and out of a frustrated way of being. She has no major complications with her health and that is a blessing.
Another day...another step into the darkness.