Fitting False Teeth into Fearful Elders: Especially When They Have Alzheimer's

Dentures and the elderly, a perfect match often do not make.

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of my full-time caregiving to my beloved mother, involving her disease of memory-loss, was my own forgetting that normalcy did not reign.

Putting on my sweater or jacket when I was chilled, I would let slip my own rule for clothes-donning: attentiveness. Invariably I would slide my hand into the pocket, and abruptly recoil, as I touched the "Thing", the creature from below, the cold slimy clam-like monstrosity that onto my fingers, dared snap -- otherwise known as my mother's mundane set of dentures. I'm glad my distress drew laughter from my mother, and eventually, after a stunned moment, from me. Yet each incident at that moment of collision, nonetheless set off tingling in every squeamish nerve-cell in my body.

Once while in the waiting room of the doctor's office, she set her dentures free, to dwell at the bottom of an aquarium. The nurse capably retrieved them with the fish net. Otherwise, the guppies in that tank would be enjoying an imitation, miniaturized shark's teeth museum to float in and out of perpetually.

In the last few years of her Alzheimer's-affected life, before she died recently, my mother's fear of dealing with anything to do with dental care kept escalating. Her dental routine sparkled with simplicity. After dining, or on other occasions, merely on a whim, she would fling the teeth wherever her fancy directed: onto the bed, under the armchair, across the table. With joie-de-vivre, she tossed her top teeth, Frisbee-like, across the room. She then stood at attention, peering anxiously at the back wall, as if wondering why the disc hadn't boomeranged back to her. Once, she threw her teeth onto the check-out conveyor belt at the supermarket, thus causing an intriguing uproar among cashier, bagger, adjacent customer.

My mother relished observing my awkward attempts, on almost a daily basis, to rescue her pearly off-whites, soiled by their latest adventure. For the entertainment value it rendered her, the memory of these fiascos warm my heart.