My Mother and Curry

 

A doctor said, “A good caregiver for Alzheimer’s disease must be a good actor and be a good detective.”

A “good actor” means someone who has the ability to listen to the patient’s repetitive stories with fresh reactions. Furthermore, sometimes the caregivers must lie to calm the patients down.

A “good detective,” on the other hand, is someone who can figure out the patient’s mysterious behaviors. It stands on a possible theory related to dementia symptoms and consent. On the surface, Alzheimer’s patients behave meaninglessly. But if you analyze the behaviors carefully, you will find that they have certain causes for manifesting. If you find the reasons why they do, you might find solutions.

In my mother’s case, she always bought curry roux every time she went shopping. We already have tons of curry roux in our house, but she would not stop buying it. If you are a good detective, you can tell why she kept doing this.

My mother was not only a housewife but was also self-employed when she was young. Sometimes she needed to work late, same thing with my father. Someone needed to prepare dinner for us children. In this situation, curry roux helped our family. If my mother made curry and rice, we can cook curry rice by ourselves. In those days, we didn’t have a microwave, so curry rice was a warm dinner only for the children. For my mother, curry roux was essential in keeping her job and family.

We detected the cause, but we couldn’t find the solution. All this despite explaining to her, “Your children are all adults now. They can cook any dinner by themselves.”

“There are tons of curry roux in our house.”

“First of all, you don’t have a job now.”

These didn’t make sense to my mother.

So I let her buy curry roux as much as she wanted. Then I gave the curry roux to my friends, relatives, and neighbors. Whenever I give them curry roux, some people are moved to tears. They quickly understand why an old retired female worker needed to buy curry roux.

There are many good detectives in our society.

Picture by takagix