The Hummingbird Friend

When I first came to Yahoo chat in June of 1999, I felt overwhelmed with responsibilities and was so stressed that my time in chat was like therapy to me. I had just begun working at the hospital as an RN on weekend nights, my son was very small, and I was caring for my ailing mother with increasing frequency. My Dad had his hands full as the primary caregiver to my mother. He was doing a wonderful job. Nevertheless, he also had a martyr complex going and was only grudgingly beginning to accept that he could not care for her all alone. He took more help from me and my husband only as each new crisis arose. That was as hard as watching my mom decline. My mother had Alzheimer’s.

She passed away in the spring of 2001. I often spoke and wrote of the issues and frustrations of watching a loved one disappear from you years before they actually die . There are so many sad things about Alzheimer’s that often one may not recognize some of the wonderful blessings that may have also happened until your loved one really is gone. I could write reams about how I dealt with changing roles. I could write of how I learned to live in the moment with her, how my husband, my father and I grew close and strong through all of this. However, today I want to write about some of those odd little profound events that taught me something else. It taught me lessons of kindness and understanding. It contains a precious memory I hope I will never lose. It does not start out reading like it is a precious thing at all to remember but if you hang on and read far enough you may get the point.

My mother had a very long decline with her Alzheimer’s. In the latter years, she was often in her own reality. She enjoyed children’s cartoons and fantasy along with my toddler son and had the same looks of wonderment and enjoyment spread across her face while they sat side by side watching the screen. She would almost always immediately forget what she saw but enjoyed it while she watched.

We had to be careful what she watched on television because even though she would forget most programs immediately after she watched them, sometimes she would remember the program, but not as she saw it. Violent police story shows would be remembered as something that happened to her in the recent past or she would think someone she knew experienced it. A particularly upsetting show might be remembered for days that way and there was no way you could reorient her to the fact that it was not a memory of a real event. Sometimes her world would be very different in how she saw her surroundings. She would see things that were not there or much more commonly, she would see something and her brain would decipher the image as something very different.

That is a very common thing in Dementia/Alzheimer’s Disease.

No matter how you tried to show otherwise, her delusions were her reality. At the beginning of this “stage”, the first psychiatrist my Dad had taken her to see was adamant in instructing my Dad the importance to “reorient her to reality”. I disagreed with that approach and still do. Most physicians now do as well. The Alzheimer’s patient is not going to get well. In the very early stages, reorienting may help ease anxiety. In the latter stages, this approach increases anxiety and frustration. Figuring out ways to help them cope with their reality and overcome their anxieties and fears rather than always working to orienting to reality is most important. The difficulty is sometimes in determining which path to choose. They live in the moment.

One afternoon we had a terrible thunderstorm with unusually heavy rain. My Dad made the mistake of saying “it’s raining cats and dogs out there”. Mother got up from the sofa and looked outside through the living room blinds. It was raining so hard you could barely see to the road. Immediately on looking out the window, she clutched at her heart and cried out “Someone has to go get that poor puppy!” I jumped up, looked outside and could see nothing but what appeared to be a white sack from some fast food place thrown by a litterbug into the ditch. I asked her, “What puppy?” She said. “There, in the ditch, Look, there is a tiny poodle huddled down there scared in the rain!” I looked out again, thinking perhaps in that torrent of rain I overlooked it. No, I don’t see anything other than that white paper sack. I tell her. “I see a white sack.” She grabbed at me, "OH no, no! See that POODLE! There is a puppy there, its right there, can’t you SEE it!? Look, I’m pointing RIGHT at it! It’s right there, in plain sight! Do I have to go get it or are you going to?” I try to calm her down and tell her again, “It isn’t a dog; it’s a paper sack someone threw in the ditch”.

Dad tells her to go sit down. He is scowling and trying to just ignore the whole thing. She is getting quite frustrated, hysteria creeping into her voice. She starts to go out the front door. She had a fall recently and neither one of us want her out there in the lightning that is crackling all around us and it is raining VERY hard. We tell her, "Please don’t go out there, it is a SACK, it is not a dog." She begins cursing at us, how can we be so cruel to leave a poodle out there! It is lost; we are so horrible not to let her go get that. She demands that if she can’t go get it that I do it. She is screaming at me. She is entirely hysterical now because we do not see it, do not believe her and she thinks we are conspiring against her amid her astonishment at our apparent indifference to this poor puppy. Dad is fussing at ME now out of frustration, “Don’t you go out there in that rain!” I get him off to the side and tell him, "Let me go get the “dog” and I’ll take it “home”." I told him I will throw the sack away if he can just keep her calm and in the living room. I decided to make up that I am going to go to the neighbors and see to whom it might belong.

I headed out the door and made a dash in that rain for the sack. Despite using a small umbrella, I am already drenched clear through to my underwear by the time I reach it. I grabbed it just as a clap of thunder and flash of lightning hit and I damn near add pee to the wetness in my underwear. Then I made a dash for the side of the house Mom cannot see from the living room window. That is also where the outdoor trashcan is located. Plop...paper bag dog has found his “home”. As I close the can I then realized that I cannot go right back in the house because the “dog” had to go home. So I stood out there under the carport, drenched to my underwear and shivering, counting off to a thousand very slowly. I thought, "Who knows, she may have even forgotten the whole incident when I walk in." Her memory was that bad it sometimes happened that she would do that, forget something the moment you leave a room.

After perhaps two or three minutes, I walked into the house and Mom pounced at me, “Where is the puppy?” I told her that I took the puppy home to the neighbor on the next block and it is doing fine. Then I walked down the hallway and changed clothes. She sat down quietly and then forgot about the whole thing. Nothing is ever again said about paper bag dog.

A few weeks goes by and she is looking out the window and tells us about how cute a baby squirrel looks as it is running up and down the driveway. Animal lover that I am I go look. It is a large oak leaf, blowing in a circular path in the wind. I pacify her rather than orient her, "Aww, yes, it sure is cute Mom." We walk away from the window. Event over. That was so much easier. Dad sees this and shrugs to me as if in realization after those two events that he was not going to try to tell her that what she “sees” is not real anymore.

She is happier in her own world than in the real world sometimes. Why deprive her of those little moments?

She also developed a weird thing about collecting tiny rocks and gravel from the backyard. She would spend hours poking around in the dirt looking for small rocks she thought "pretty".She had jars of those rocks lining the dining room windowsill. She would go outside in the backyard for an hour or so each day to look for "pretty crystals" (sometimes I would take her for actual crystal digs and a couple of times to the diamond mine at Murfreesboro and she adored this but that's another story) So, one day when she came in from her outside dig and announced to my Dad and me that she had a hummingbird friend who would let her pet it at the hummingbird feeder, we gave each other a” knowing" look. We nodded and said things like "how nice", "Uh huh, that's great." Both of us thought it was another delusion; we will pacify her and move along.

The next week when I came over for one of my days to help care for Mom and relieve my Dad, as I entered the house, I called out for Mom. Dad came out of the kitchen and said, “She is in the backyard.” I looked out the dining room window to see her standing at the hummingbird feeder I always kept full so we could enjoy watching them eat while we ate, and there stood my mother...

petting a hummingbird!

She is stroking its little back with her index finger and talking to it sweetly. The hummingbird is dipping her beak into the feeder, looks back at my Mom every few seconds, and then dips her head again.

I quickly call out to Dad, “DAD YOU GOTTA SEE THIS QUICK! And I mean HURRY AND LOOK!”

He comes running to the window and we both look at each other with our mouths agape.
“OH MY GOD SHE WAS TELLING THE TRUTH! This one wasn't a delusion! She really DID have a hummingbird friend!” She came in and was just as calm as could be as if it was not at all out of the ordinary to have a hummingbird friend.

That summer we watched her pet that little female hummingbird another half dozen times. Each time we stood there astonished. My only regret is that we did not take a photograph. I do not know why it never even entered the minds of either of us to try. They were brief encounters that put us both in awe to witness.

*** Note*** I copied that image a long time ago and don't have a page to credit so if anyone knows, I'll be happy edit for credit. It isn't my Mom's friend :)