August 10, 2011

My Summer Vacation, Part 1: It’s the Journey, Not the Destination, That’s Important,…Right?

Tags: Caregiver stress, Memory loss, Quality of life

Written by: Tina Harris Bergman

There’s nothing quite like a summer vacation! Getting out of town is a great opportunity to step away from day-to-day living and see the world from a new perspective.
Travel is also the stuff of which memories are made, but we had no idea how much a trip away from home would also reveal about my husband’s continuing memory loss.
Two weeks ago, Mike and I packed our car and headed to Sedona, Arizona. Road map in hand, we put the hustle and bustle of Los Angeles behind us. We looked forward to seeing more natural scenery, and, as we moved across the Mojave Desert, we weren’t disappointed.

The austere beauty of the desert spread out before us and was slowly replaced by fragrant pines, red rock, and pristine blue skies. Near Flagstaff, we experienced the awesome power of an unexpected desert thunderstorm. The air cooled at higher elevation, and the sun returned. Winding our way down Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona, we were deeply enchanted and grateful to have the opportunity to experience a whole week in this very, very special place.
When I go on vacation, I’ve learned to expect the unexpected. Of course, we met new people and visited unfamiliar places. We explored with a sense of real wonder and adventure, visiting ancient Indian ruins, an old mining town, a fish hatchery—even a diner tricked out as a barbecue joint. What we hadn’t counted on, or even really considered, was what we would find out about ourselves.
A vacation provides a break from routine, and I think we all need that from time to time. However, as we discovered, routine and habit contribute significantly to my husband’s ability to successfully navigate his days. This was our first extended vacation since Mike’s challenges with memory loss began, and we soon found out just how much our reliance on routine has masked the decline of some of his cognitive skills.
Just packing for the trip itself was challenging. We were staying in a condo, so I had household goods as well as clothing and personal items to pack. Responsible for packing his own things, Mike struggled to remember what he had put in his luggage—and, yes, we continued to arm wrestle over his resistance to making a list or writing things down!
Outside our own community and familiar home environment, Mike and I enjoyed our journey, but we both also grew more frustrated with his inability to perform basic cognitive tasks. For example, his sense of direction became disoriented, and he had trouble reading a map. So the onus for “getting us there” fell on me. I had already done all the planning and most of the packing for the trip, so I began to feel a bit resentful—some vacation, right!
For at least a little while, fear and denial took over, and we bickered about everything and nothing. Neither of us wanted to face what we were seeing. It was kind of like the story of the Emperor and His New Clothes: Stripped of our routine, we were naked, but nobody wanted to talk about the reality of it.
Oh, yeah, we were off to a great start. And we hadn’t even arrived at our destination!
In my next blog, I’ll share how we brought the familiarity of home on vacation with us and what a difference it made. While we discovered you can’t escape memory loss—even in idyllic Red Rock Country—you can survive it just fine.