Presents for the Person With Frontotemporal Dementia

What do you buy a man or woman that only reads in small spurts, doesn’t write, doesn’t drive, doesn’t have any hobbies and can’t do anything on his or her own that requires multiple steps? Someone with an advanced condition of aphasia as a part of his or her frontotemporal dementia?

It’s been hard to wrap my brain about it. My mother was – and is – a booklover. She was a writer; she wrote haiku and senryu and all sorts of poems all of her life. She spoke lyrically. She was all about the absorption of information: about learning, about thinking, about the juxtaposition of thought and feeling.

Much of that has been taken from her by this disease. I don’t like to think about it too much. All of those books that she was going to read when she retired, for example. Not so much.

She used to love perfume and lotions and soaps and creams, but they pretty much totally lost their appeal when she couldn’t smell anymore. She sometimes puts perfume on, although I try to help because otherwise she’ll be a walking cloud o’ scent.

So, what you have to do is really look at the day to day existence of the person in question. Last year Dad bought Mom lots of clothes. Clothes are an excellent option.

I’ve started to dig deeper into other areas of Mom’s life. I guess these are things I took for granted but they will come in handy now. She loves soft textiles, fabrics. So this year I bought her socks that are all fuzzy and aloe-infused. I got them in bright colors so that they look pretty and will be easy for her to spot and match up. I got her super-soft pajamas.

Just yesterday I remembered that for many years she wore a necklace with a Taurus bull horn in gold. I don’t know what happened to her necklace but that would be a wonderful gift, I think. She still loves jewelry.

She doesn’t wear her wedding rings anymore because she kept shrinking and there was too great a chance of them falling off and getting lost. So, she wears some cheap rings that she hangs onto and twists. I could go to the jeweler and resize her real rings. Dad would still be afraid that she’d lose them, but she could at least wear them to family events and stuff.

What else have we gotten for Mom? Oh, she loves raspberry jelly. That’s a key one. And she needs slippers, although there’s some question on whether she’ll use them.

Yeah, it’s tough. But doable. You have to think about things that are very in-the-moment.

Someone once told me that the blessing of dementia is that you are forced to live in the moment, forced to abandon all other strings and simply be in the moment. I don’t know about the blessing part, but it’s true. And that’s the key to buying presents for anyone with dementia – if it’s something that can be appreciated without complexities or plans, then it will work.

By the way, I used to wrap her presents in front of her, thinking she wouldn’t remember. But no, she remembered. It’s easy to think with dementia that Mom is not absorbing what’s going on around her. But on the contrary, she usually knows exactly what’s going on although she may not be able to say so. So, now I make her turn around so that she doesn’t see her presents!

My mother, age 69, was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dementia in January 2011. She has Progressive Nonfluent Aphasia. She also shows the cognitive (but not motor) symptoms related to Corticobasal Syndrome, such as apraxia, acalculia, visual-spatial impairment and significant language issues. My father and I are her caregivers. Our story is at http://ftdland.net.

Article by: Marlene J Geary

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