My Mother’s New Friends in Memory Care

I spent two days last week hanging out with a quirky, fun group of women my mother has befriended in memory care. There was a lot of laughing — much more than you might expect from five women with dementia.

Janet, whose father owned a meatpacking company in the Bronx, told us at one point that she married for money and that it had worked out very well for her. Anna, who immigrated to Washington, D.C. from Germany just after WWII, said she came to the U.S. for the big houses. “People lived in such small houses in Germany,” she told us. She also hates Britain because everyone is so obsessed with the Queen. (I tried explaining that the Queen had died and that people are now focused on the King, but she didn’t seem to believe me.)

My mother has been in memory care since November. When she first moved in, she told me she had no interest in getting to know the other “inmates” (her word, not mine), and she refused to consider participating in any activities. I tried to coax her into an arts and crafts session. I sat down beside her and started coloring, telling her I’d forgotten how enjoyable it could be. She looked at me, dead serious, and said, “I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work.”

About a month later, my husband and I visited and learned that she had become a regular at the word games. We joined one round of Would You Rather. My mother needed the question repeated a few times, but eventually made it clear that she would rather not be either a professional musician or a professional athlete—but if forced to choose, she would pick anything other than an athlete.

And now, seven months later, here she was with her circle of friends. At one point, all of us made paper stained glass windows (which, I have to admit, was also fun).

My mother was always social, but I don’t remember her ever having a close circle of female friends like this. And they genuinely seem to like one another. Pat told me she can always tell where my mother is because she recognizes her distinctive laugh. She said they look out for one another.

But there was something a bit unsettling about the group. It had an element of Mean Girls to it. I realized that these women had gravitated toward one another in part because they are all in a similar stage of dementia. They are verbal, mostly mobile, and able to feed themselves.

At one point, a woman with more advanced dementia began approaching the table, crying out incoherently. She was clearly in distress. But as she came closer, Janet shouted back at her and told her to go away. I tried to calm things down. I told Janet that the woman seemed distressed and that we should try to be kind. But Janet turned on me and insisted the woman didn’t belong at their table, and that I needed to accept that.

Fortunately, a staff member stepped in to comfort the woman, and the moment passed.

I was shaken by the outburst, but I also recognized something familiar. This is what happens in all kinds of social groups. A group defines itself, in part, by who is not in it. In this case, the residents with more advanced dementia. The difference here is that these women have lost the filters that usually soften those boundaries.

It reminded me of a scene in Dying for Sex, where Michelle Williams, who has stage-four cancer, sneaks into a support group for women in earlier stages of the disease. The women in the group are more hopeful than the members of the later stage group. The early-stage cancer patients speak about cancer as something to get through. But when they learn Michelle Williams is actually stage four, they quickly push her out. A social worker later explains that she frightens them—that they need to believe they will survive.

I found myself growing unexpectedly attached to my mother’s new friends. Now that I’m back home in Brooklyn, I think about them. I wonder what they had for lunch, whether they liked it, what the afternoon activity was. I never had children, but I imagine this is something like what it feels like to send a child off to school—you want them to have friends, to feel included and happy.

And, at the same time, you hope they are learning how to be kind to the ones who don’t.