Illustration by Drew Shannon
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I walk into the living room to a barrage of gunfire.
My mom is watching TV in her favourite easy chair, a serene smile on her face. “I’ve never seen this movie before,” she says. “It’s good!”
My mom has dementia. She also loves action movies. She is watching Taken with Liam Neeson, a 2008 movie she indeed has seen before, just like she’s seen Taken 2 and Taken 3 repeatedly over the years. In that series, everyone’s been taken but the family goldfish.
She should know these movies like the back of her hand, every fist fight and blast of machine gunfire in this revenge tale where fisticuffs and gun battles are choreographed into a brutal ballet. But I don’t tell her that. Instead, I smile and lower the volume on the TV.
My sweet 80-year-old mom has always been a fan of action movies, the grittier the better. She lets out a quiet chuckle every time the hero knocks a bad guy through a wall or blows up a building. Mom can’t stand real-world violence of any kind but somehow gets a kick out of the cartoonish mayhem of action movies.
The first time I realized she’d forgotten some of her favourite films, it was a shock. She asked to watch one and I put it on for her. “I’ve never seen this one before,” she said and I immediately laughed. I thought she was joking until I saw the confused expression on her face.
“You’ve never seen this movie?” I asked gently, just to be sure of what I’d heard. “Nope,” she said and she wasn’t kidding. It was the first time I realized the true scope of her disease and how much it was taking from her every day.
How can love endure when Alzheimer’s takes him away?
Lately, she doesn’t want to do any of the things she once enjoyed: going out for brunch, heading to a boardwalk on a sunny day, going shopping at Giant Tiger, or just for a drive to get coffees and look at the ocean.
But she still loves her action movies. She enjoys stories where a tough but secretly kind badass protects the vulnerable and opens a can of whoop ass on the bullies of this world. I can’t blame her; I like them, too. Action movies are fun and cathartic, offering fictionalized justice in two-hour chunks. Good guys prevail; bad guys get kicked in the face. What’s not to like?
“How about this one?” I say the next evening. “I heard it was good.” I put on The Beekeeper with Jason Statham and we settle in. It’s probably her second-favourite action movie featuring her second-favourite action man. She’s seen all his movies, too. Mom quickly gets into the story and is soon enthralled. “This is really good,” she says. “I’ve never seen this one before.”
I feel a bit guilty for the trickery. I’m lying to her in a way, lying by omission. It’s the same feeling I get when she points at something and utters a few unrelated words and I start to guess at what she wants until I get it right. Or when she calls me by my sister’s name and I don’t correct her. That’s when the “shoulds” come in – should I correct her when she insists it’s Tuesday when it’s Friday?
Would it be better to tell her the movies she’s been watching for the “first time” are her all-time favourites and she’s seen them a million times?
I’ve always been completely honest with my mother but telling her the truth right now feels wrong. It feels unkind.
Besides if this terrible disease has given her a clean movie slate, so be it. It might be a good thing for someone who has lost interest in just about everything else.
Mom is otherwise in good physical health and although she’s quiet nowadays and her big, outgoing personality is somewhat dimmed, she is still my mom. For now. I treasure that.
“You can’t fool me; you just like this movie because of Jason Statham,” I tease. “You’d marry him if you could.” She laughs. She has the best laugh.
“He’s very handsome,” she says. “But he’s no Liam Neeson.”
Dawn Morrison lives in Dartmouth.