On Death and Dying, Part 2

Physically, Dee Dee seems to be doing great. We've got a new home health person (we politely fired the last one and her agency) named Jennifer, and she got on Dee Dee's good side by giving her two massages.

Mentally, things are a different story. Dee Dee has latched on to the idea that she's dead. But at the same time, she knows she's alive. She doesn't seem to have a problem with the logical inconsistencies.

While listening to a podcast of RadioLab (which I highly recommend), they had a segment on Cotard's Syndrome. You can listen to it here - just go to part 6, around the 5:00 mark of the 2nd segment. Basically, it's a mental illness where the patient believes that they are dead. Reading up on it in Wikipedia, one of the first diagnoses of this disease went hand-in-hand with not eating, which Dee Dee did for a while Wednesday. She told Michele she didn't need to eat "because of what we talked about earlier."

Those who know Dee Dee lately knows that she loves to eat. I wouldn't have thought she could go 4 hours without eating. But she went almost 24 hours the other day.

Anyway, I'm not a doctor and I have no idea if this is what she suffers from. But I personally find it helpful to look at her thoughts as the effects of a disease rather than ... I don't know. To me, it seems similar to when your three-year-old might say "I hate you, Daddy!" You're not going to lose sleep over it. It's a passing thought that they sincerely hold, but it doesn't reflect their true self. If you decide to argue with the three-year-old, you'll be sorely disappointed. They don't hold to ideas of logic or reason.

It's fair to say that Michele is struggling pretty hard with these death delusions. I think we were pretty prepared for her forgetfulness and her physical impairments. But the delusions have caught us off guard.

We're getting her to see a doctor soon. The hope is that he can either convince that as a medical expert, she can believe him when he says she's not dead. Otherwise, he could refer us to a psychiatrist or something.

Basically, we don't know how to talk to her. Do we contradict her? Convince her she's alive? Or can Dee Dee happily live another decade believing she's dead? Or is it a passing fancy that we shouldn't worry about?

Right now, Dee Dee treats Michele as her confidante. That's a good thing. But I'm thinking it might be helpful for some other folks Dee Dee knows and loves to also talk to her about these thoughts.