Deena and I always moved at slightly different speeds. I’m much more a pedal to the metal kind of person, while Deena took a more leisurely approach to life. Our differences had complimented each other. She taught me to slow down. I taught her that some things required her to speed up.
But I quickly learned that her dementia really changed this dynamic in our relationship. She really only had one speed, slow, erratic and easily distracted from the task at hand. And as her disease progressed, her tolerance for my speed deteriorated. “Why are you running around so fast?” she’d ask me as I was working to get us out the door on time to an appointment.
I came to realize that what I thought of as simply keeping our life on time and functioning played into one of Deena’s biggest deficits. Too much action, to fast, with too much information at one time left her anxious, confused and on the verge of anger, clearly a recipe for disaster.
So, I taught myself to slow down. I literally learned to slow down as I walked through the living room where Deena was sitting and then pick up my normal walking pace as soon as I was out of her sight. I learned to plan even further in advance and then share those plans with her in small pieces, allowing her to absorb the information a little at a time.
I also learned that I couldn’t just slow down physically, but that I also had to slow my internal processing because she always knew when I was moving in slow motion, but my brain was racing a thousand miles an hour. It seemed counter intuitive that going slower helped Deena not be overwhelmed and anxious and actually got her moving faster, but I learned that it really did work.