Lois

Is Lois unhappy? Does she know??  

Those are very good questions, and ones that I have asked myself a hundred times.

For a long time, she was upset, because as she said to me several times,  "I think I'm losing my mind".  I first noticed that something was wrong, when she couldn't thread the loom without massive mistakes.  Then she couldn't treadle anything but two treadles, because she lost her place every few seconds.  That was so totally unlike her.

Then last year, she began to be very erratic in her driving, and she began scaring me.......she didn't at all take it seriously that she was losing her ability to drive.  In fact, she laughed about it.

She also would take off after dark, to "go get ice cream, or go to the grocery store", and come back with nothing.  Her partner tried to intervene, but at that point she was oppositional to everything anyone tried to tell her.

Then she began telling me that she needed to 'be somewhere else, live somewhere else'......

I believe that she knew by then that she needed supervision, that she needed to be "managed".

That's when her sister and I got her into assisted living.  Lois was all for it, but after two nights there she walked out (in February) with no coat and ended up quite a long ways away at a liquor store that was just closing at 11:30 at night. 

She didn't know why she was there, and was so confused that the owner called the sheriff, who took her to the ER.....luckily she had the. Alzheimer's bracelet on, and they called her sister.

The next morning we took her back, and she went to Memory Care in another part of the facility that day.

It's a closed unit, and she actually only grumbled a little about it.

Her sister takes her out several times a week for a couple hours at a time.  She brings her here to visit, and that is so much nicer than visiting her there.

She knows me, I think, by sight, but already I doubt that she knows my name all the time.  Another of our friends, that she saw several times a week, is a stranger to her, and she does not know who she is.

Her disease has progressed rapidly over the last year.  

She shuffles now.  She can't read, but will hold a book like she is reading.  I think it's a comfort to her, as she was a serial reader all her life.

She still has her phone, and sometimes she can figure it out, and most times it is by chance.  She calls someone only because she clicks on their name in her contacts.  She will call me and then ask who I am, when I tell her she says, "oh no, I didn't want to call you, I wanted  my sister"........I do call her, and the conversation is mostly me, guessing what it is she is trying to tell me.  Occasionally, she gets something out that makes sense, but it is rare these days.

She gave me this card, the first Christmas she was here.  It speaks volumes about who she was.

This is a photo of me on the left, my friend Alice in the middle, and

Lois on the right, having lunch, when she first came to the studio.

And here she is waiting for that trailer truck full of sock seconds and loopers to back into my driveway so we could unload them into the barn.

I am so grateful for the 13 years we had.  She was a fantastic apprentice, and a huge help, and a great friend.  

There is no one on the planet with a bigger heart, which makes her present situation that much harder to wrap my brain around.

It's a cruel, cruel way to end a life.

The link below is to a blog post I wrote years ago, about Lois "deciding" that she wanted to be my apprentice.

Wow, do I miss her.

Lois comes to CAAL.