COVER STORY : Couple’s Sense of Humor Helps Them Cope With Care
Diana and Bill Price laugh a lot. Aunt Goldie’s utterances have them in stitches. Bill even displays a list of “Goldie-isms” on the refrigerator door in the kitchen of their Carlsbad home. The garbled sayings of his aunt--Goldie Cuippernus, 95--are worth saving, he believes.
“Listen to this,” Bill chuckled as he read from the list: “I am presumptuously purified. There is something else on the cesspool. What’s on her sailor tailor ship? My stars of liberty! That’s a good sexation!”
The Prices also care for Diana’s mother, Frances Emily Dow, 85. Both women suffer from late-stage Alzheimer’s disease, are legally blind, incontinent and incapable of doing anything for themselves.
Bill and Diana, however, are as proud of their two Alzheimer’s charges as they might be of adorable toddlers who do and say adorable things.
They immortalize many moments with a borrowed camcorder. One afternoon, while Frances was away at the Oceanside Alzheimer’s Center and Goldie was kissing everyone’s arms and elbows, the Prices played a home movie on their VCR.
There’s Bill, stripping Goldie down to her bare nothings as she stands clinging to the bathroom towel rack for dear life. There’s Bill, dumping a water-logged diaper into the trash and racing double time to towel, diaper and dress the tiny 95-pound auntie, whose incessant praise of the man she believes is her husband, is speeded up to sound like a cartoon duck.
When Bill revs up the speed, it’s like watching a madcap silent comedy. It isn’t a comedy, of course. It is Alzheimer’s. The facts of creative care giving.
“To some people this may look like we are ridiculing my mom and Goldie,” said Diana, 53, as she wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. Only moments before Diana had shed tears of rage at the recollection of trying to get her mother’s Social Security increased to pay for desperately needed supplies.
On a practical level, recording the daily rituals of their two live-in loved ones allows the Prices to show rather than tell sitters how to care for Goldie and Frances.
Diana and her husband of 35 years, Bill, pretty much operate in an atmosphere of optimism and humor.
“We have this joke,” Diane said, turning to Bill after her mother had returned from the day-care center and sat pouting on the couch: “I thought she was your mother!”
In getting to a place where they can cope, Bill and Diana have had to relinquish the major portion of the jewelry business that once had them traveling all over the country.
Diana’s mother--who evidenced symptoms of Alzheimer’s seven years ago when she began seeing black bunnies in the vegetable garden--has been living with the couple all along. But, Bill’s Aunt Goldie became part of the household after her husband of 65 years died of cancer four years ago.
Bill rescued his auntie from a dark, filthy house that hadn’t been cleaned in 30 years. Proceeds from the sale of that house--after Bill spent a “solid year” cleaning and repainting it--have helped make it possible for the Prices to stay at home and care for Goldie and Frances.
Too late the Prices discovered they might have sheltered some of that money had they sought appropriate legal advice. Similarly, it took the Prices three years to find that Frances and Goldie qualified for various benefits, from Medi-Cal to In-Home Support Services.
In-Home Services assistance, in essence, pays Diana to tend to some of her mother’s needs herself or to engage help. The assistance also allows the Prices to hire a sitter so they can go out a couple of times a month. “The first three years,” Diana said, “it was 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” They often felt isolated and alone.
Day care represented a salvation--once they figured out how to pay for it.
“My mother didn’t have Medi-Cal because I thought you had to be destitute to claim it, truly destitute,” Diana said. “How can you have a daughter who loves you and be destitute? When I found out she was eligible for it, that made a tremendous difference.”
